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

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 outcomes

This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:

Introduction

This chapter will contribute to and perhaps challenge your understanding of what makes us ‘tick’. It will add to your understanding of human nature in negotiating new circumstances, as a student, citizen and teacher. It will focus specifically at times on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island cultures and worldviews.

Intercultural Understanding is not a subject area in the Australian Curriculum, but it is one of the seven General Capabilities. The Curriculum describes intercultural understanding, in part, as, ‘engaging with people of diverse cultures in ways that recognise commonalities and differences, create connections and cultivate respect between people’ (ACARA, 2012b, p. 21).

Learning outcomes

This chapter aims to contribute to your ability to:

Introduction

To understand history is to understand people, including yourself, and how we came to be the way we are. As the NSW History Syllabus states, ‘History is a disciplined process of inquiry into the past that helps to explain how people, events and forces from the past have shaped our world’ (NSW Board of Studies, 2012, p. 9). Ask yourself, for example: ‘If I had been US President Harry Truman in 1945, would I have dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan?’ Why or why not? What if you had been Japan’s Emperor Hirohito, would you have dropped atomic bombs on US or Australian cities to end the war? If you had found out that ‘September 11’ was about to happen, whom would you have told, and how would you have convinced them? Would you have shot Osama bin Laden? Why or why not?

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:

A pedagogical credo

This claim (or something like it in Greek) was made by Archimedes more than 2000 years ago. He wasn’t a social worker, but a mathematician, and he was actually talking about physically moving the world. What are your metaphorical firm places to stand on, and how, why and in what direction might you move the world?

In education we have often spoken of the so-called ‘three Rs’: reading, writing and arithmetic. Education is arguably more dominated and populated by Cs. In deference to the basics, my personal and provisional statement of faith will start with an A-B-C.

A worthwhile education is one that assists people to become creative, compassionate (or caring) and critically literate big-thinkers, dreamers and visionaries. In short, education exists for the purpose of creating citizens. Your students will need a certain measure of courage to achieve these things, and commitment.

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.