Learning outcomes

This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:

Introduction

This chapter is placed under the topic of processes because the study of values should pervade and permeate all of your teaching. The chapter explores how the heart might be drawn into our studies of society and environment, and at how our hearts might metaphorically respond. As with Civics and Citizenship Education in particular, values education is cognitive, affective and conative (or ‘volitional’; Kriewaldt & Taylor, 2012, p. 304)) in nature. Kriewaldt and Taylor add that values education is ‘one of the most complex and ambiguous aspects of teaching’. A discussion of the federal government’s Northern Territory Intervention, or of funding for non-government schools, for example, might garner vastly different and passionately held views. If you are teaching an issue that you hold dear, it may be helpful to stand back, examine and decode the things that make you so passionate about it.

Learning objectives

This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:

Introduction

Globalisation is not new. To speak of a beginning of globalisation is, to some extent, meaningless. The world has never been anything other than global! The difference is that we have become more aware (that is, educated) about the phenomenon in recent times. Vast empires existed in the past, long before the age of European colonisation, including the Mongol Empire, arguably the biggest empire in history, and various Chinese and Islamic empires.

In Australia’s region, the empires of Majapahit (based in present-day Java, around the 14th and15th centuries CE) and Srivijaya (centred in Sumatra, as early as the 8th century CE) covered considerable areas and exercised influence, if not control, more widely again over land and sea. Many of us in Australia are only vaguely, if at all, aware of them. The Khmer Empire, with its capital Angkor, might be more familiar. In our extended region, the teachings of the Buddha, Confucius and Hinduism were being spread long before the birth of Christianity. More recently, the teachings of Islam came to the region. Depending on your dei nition of slave trading, such trades have existed for centuries, if not millennia. Large migrations of people are not new; migrations across the Pacific and around the Indian oceans occurred long before Europeans colonised the region. Aboriginal spirituality asserts that Indigenous people have been in present-day Australia since the Beginning, the Dreaming. Some archaeological evidence suggests, however, that migrations occurred more than 45000 years ago, perhaps even 60000 years ago.

Learning outcomes

This chapter aims to:

Introduction

Cambodian leader Pol Pot makes a fascinating character study. Compared to the Holocausts of World War II against Jews, Romani, gay people and others, his Killing Fields in Cambodia are closer to us in time and place. One criterion for being chosen and forced by Pol Pot to work as a farm labourer was wearing glasses. The ‘logic’ behind that was that such people were deemed to be intellectuals and, as such, were a threat to the new regime. They were sent to farms because in Pol Pot’s mind the work of greatest worth was food production. In reality, most of these people, from the cities and therefore unaccustomed to farm labour, worked themselves to an exhausted, undernourished, possibly disease-ridden death, hence the name ‘The Killing Fields’.

Learning outcomes

This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:

Introduction

Understanding the fields of study that you need to teach (the focus of the previous chapters), at least to a level that allows you to survive in the classroom, is perhaps a less demanding task than devising how to make these fields of study comprehensible, engaging, relevant and thought-provoking for your students. We now turn our attention to these processes of socio-environmental education.

Learning outcomes

This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:

Introduction

Geography essentially focuses on how we describe and make sense of, use, divide up and imagine places. Consider some of the following:

Learning outcomes

This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:

Introduction

Education is nothing if not communication. This chapter deals not only with appropriating news stories of the day as a resource for your teaching; it also concerns:

The word ‘text’ is used broadly here to include oral, written, pictorial and electronic texts, sites of interest and learning, guest speakers, relections and the like. The chapter is largely practice-oriented. All the activities and materials you use in your classroom should be strategic, emerging from your informed theories and rationales about sound education. A medium (plural, media) is a means or a way of conveying, transporting or connecting. It is linked with the sense of medium meaning ‘in the middle’. A medium connects people to ideas, information, opinion, bodies of knowledge, each other and sometimes themselves.