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Week 3: Commonwealth History Project

Because Ngurunderi and Mulyawongk are about the creation of the land features of South Australia, it also fills in a puzzle piece for me, it gives me information about what Aboriginal People from these area's believe. I wonder if there is a set of readers that have The Dreamings from a group of people. It would be interesting to use them in a classroom and see how/if the parents reacted. I think some might be annoyed and/or refuse for their child to read them. I see The Dreamings as an alternative idea to evolution and creation theory. Is there a Dreaming narrative that explains the creation of the world, or do they only travel as far as the limits of Australia? 

Hearing from Mary (names changed for privacy) and Joan about how they incorporated a unit of work about Kaurna People was really interesting and useful. It reinforces to me that you can take whatever theme you like and incorporate it across the curriculum. And I believe that this makes for deeper learning because you create multiple entry points to access the same information. It also allows children to build on what they already know.

The idea of marking group work individually I think is a brilliant idea! Mary said she recorded what each person does (would have been good to know how this happened) and I think that you could teach your students to do some of this as well. I know that I usually shudder when I hear that I have to participate in a group assignment and have learnt to pick group partners carefully. The downfall of this is that I tend to work with the same people to a certain extent. I also find that I tend to extend myself more when I work with a group, I suppose because the people I try to work with are hard workers and are at University to do the best they can. Therefore they are willing to put in effort also. There seems to be much conflict about how to select groups. Random, with friends, by learning style, ability level, the list goes on. I think it would depend on the activity. During Final Practicum I did random grouping which worked ok (I was doing an activity where children interviewed each other about their holiday activities). We also did some more prolonged group work, in which my teacher divided up the children using a combination of ability and friends. This also seemed to work well.

It would be interesting to interview a group of children to hear what they think. You could ask who they prefer to work with and why, who they learn/work best with, do you prefer it when you select the groups or when the teacher does? I generally prefer it when the teacher makes the groups for brief discussions, but choose my own group when it's a group project. I'm curious about what children would prefer because I wonder if Indigenous students within a class would prefer to work together because from some of the information that I have been reading (Perspectives on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Education, Ed. Gary Partington and Aboriginal Kids in Urban Classrooms,  Ed. Stephen Harris  Merridy Malin) Indigenous students may have a similar perspective to each other. But then that's stereotyping too. Just because some Indigenous families consist of Grandparents, Aunties and Uncles, doesn,t mean that all do. I think it would come down to each individual, just like everything. The more I think about this subject the more I realise its not just about Indigenous Australian students. It's about seeing the children in our class as individuals and getting to know each individual (as much as possible) so that we can cater to their needs. In my opinion that's the biggest problem about the majority of schools- they teach/preach to the masses. As a student teacher I find it easiest to teach in the same manner as the teacher I'm with, so I find it hard to know how to cater to individuals when I haven't seen it done effectively.

Posted at 02:48PM Oct 07, 2008 by April W  |