Media Release
November 16 2006
Connecting curriculum and community
The
creative ways teachers in Adelaide’s northern suburbs are engaging with
their students is the focus of the Australian Education Union Middle
School Conference in Adelaide this Friday.
Dietary habits, global food issues, clay animation and creating meaningful work using the TV series Buffy as a starting point are just some of the topics through which teachers are helping students make connections between learning and their everyday lives.
The middle school teachers will present the results of the 26 action research projects at the conference to mark the completion of the second year of the $700,000 Redesigning Pedagogies in the North (RPiN) project, led by the University of South Australia, which aims to build curriculum and educational practices that engage young people’s lifeworlds and the concerns of their communities.
Project director, Associate Professor Robert Hattam, says the three-year project addresses the need for educational reform in middle years of schooling.
“The last decade of research and development in this field is nearly exhausted,” he says. “As the projects to be presented at this conference show, RPiN has already been successful in bringing together students, teachers and researchers to develop new forms of curriculum and ways of learning.”
Some of the projects include:
• Community issues and middle school maths: an exciting marriage, which engaged students by using maths to investigate the availability of recreational areas for students and families; and
• Mobile phone use: connecting students’ lifeworlds with understanding of statistics, in which students used statistics to consider a demographic analysis of mobile phone use.
AEU Middle School Conference
9am to 4.15pm, Friday November 17
Australian Education Union
163 Greenhill Rd, Parkside
Media contact
- Vincent Ciccarello office (08) 8302 0578 mobile 0434 603 457 email vincent.ciccarello@unisa.edu.au