SWISP Lab x Teachers in Radical Residency: Master of Teaching, Work Integrated Learning (June, 2024)
Over the last two weeks SWISP Lab have had three excellent teacher candidates from the Faculty of Education in radical residency for their WIL Capstone projects.
What is WIL you ask? Work Integrated Learning (WIL) is an umbrella term used to describe a variety of learning experiences which integrate academic theory with authentic real-world work experiences.
The three teachers-in-residence came to SWISP Lab with fabulous self-study teacher research questions, wondering about how we might help them in their quest.
Meet the teachers-in-residence – Helen, Fang and Tinky.
Image generated with the assistance of AI.
Helen Lui (Sze Hooi), Master of Teaching Secondary (Visual Arts and Design) Capstone question: How can storytelling allow students to express their authentic identity through visual activities?
Tingxuan (Tinky) Mai, Master of Teaching (Early Childhood and Primary) Capstone question: How can digital multimodal texts support EAL/D students’ meaning-making and develop critical literacy in middle and upper primary years?
Fang Liu, Master of Teaching (Early Childhood) Capstone question: How can I use ICT tools to support language learning and cultural adaptation for international students in early childhood settings？
Over to you Helen, Fang and Tinky
H.I.T (HAK.io Inspired Teaching)
Hacking HITS
The H.I.T (HAK.io Inspired Teaching) program adapts HAK.io projects into different curriculum areas for early childhood, primary, and secondary contexts. It aims to foster students’ understanding of climate change from a global perspective. In this program, students engage in a process of critical inquiry, enabling them to contextualise and address the issues of climate change through their personal experiences. Students will have the opportunity for critical reflection and identification of surrounding environments throughout diverse learning activities, using multimodal approaches to help articulate learning.
Tinky, Fang and I (Helen) have begun our WIL residency with HAK.io. We have developed our code called H.I.T; we are hacking HAK.io to inspire teachers to teach in the classroom by using SWISP Lab’s HAK.io.
This is a zine I (Helen) created during the process of H.I.T. I have begun researching my self-identity, what I am searching for, what HAK.io is, and what this can do for me. The zine I created was responded to working and thinking about exploring HAK.io and, at the same time, how to integrate HAK.io into our pedagogies.
On the first day we entered studioFive, I remember Sarah was questioning us: What do you like SWISP to bring to you, and what do you want to get to SWISP? I said, “I am not sure.” After two weeks of wayfaring, we can now tell you the answer!
My capstone research question is about how might storytelling empower students to express their authentic identity through visual activities … how might you be yourself when doing art…? As an artist, I engage and think thoughtfully about myself, my personal climate story can be found in HAK.io, As a researcher, I think about how to draw people’s attention and engage in creating and making. Then, as educators, Tinky, Fang and I designed and wrote a series of learning plans that integrate with HAK.io to teach students.
Being in the world, existing in the world as subject, thus means to stay in the difficult and precarious ‘middle ground’ between the two extremes of world-destruction and self-destruction. Staying in this middle ground is an ongoing – we might say lifelong – challenge, a question that arises each time we initiate, each time we take initiative, each time we seek to bring something into the world. Staying in the middle ground can be understood, as I have indicated above, as a matter of dialogue – being in dialogue with – as long as we do not think dialogue as verbal conversation but as an existential form. Finally, if it is the case that the education question is the question of how to (come to) exist as subject, then we
Biesta, Gert (2017). Touching the soul? Exploring an alternative outlook for philosophical work with children and young people. Childhood and Philosophy. 13 (28).
might say that the middle ground between world-destruction and self-destruction is the space and place of education.
The SWISP lab is acting like a liminal space of thought. It enables you to sit down and think about the pedagogy of self in a third space of not knowing and then knowing. We work in the middle ground, interrupt the current self, do self-exploration, suspend ourselves, and look for new possibilities. Then, we sustain and strengthen ourselves to raise awareness of the climate.
This is the journey of us; this is the zine of H.I.T. It is how we have formed our ideas through playing, creating, observing, questioning, exploring and wondering whether physical collaboration or digital collaboration. We even use emoji stickers to express ourselves, meaning using coloured stickers (See HAK.io emoji blog). This is language-creation from SWISP.
Here are the 14x HAK.io methods. After we explored and played through all the methods ourselves, we gained a deep understanding of how these activities foster knowledge-making. Initially, we planned to select six suitable methods for each grade level and design the lessons separately.
However, after further discussion, we decided to reflect on the differences by selecting six methods suitable for Kinder to Year 8 and then differentiate them within the specific lesson designs. We selected the following methods:
1. Climate Story
2. Combining Emoji Story and Emotion Mapping
3. Walking
4. Zines
5. Digital Play
6. Badges.
And then we discussed our program’s overview. The H.I.T. (HAK.io Inspired Teaching) program adapts the HAK.io project for early childhood, primary, and secondary contexts to develop a global perspective on climate change. Through critical inquiry and personal experiences, students engage in activities that integrate literacy, science, geography, and the arts. Supported by the EYLF and VCAA F-10 curriculum.
This image was created with the assistance of DALL·E 2.
On completion of this project, students will be able to:
- Critically reflect on climate change practices and effectively communicate ideas about global climate change issues.
- Engage in diverse educational activities that are respectful of cultural, environmental, and technological perspectives, and that foreground sustainable practices.
- Utilise new technologies as part of their learning process to enrich their understanding and communication of ideas related to climate change.
This image was created with the assistance of DALL·E 2.
This program will develop the following set of key transferable skills for students:
- Creativity and innovation.
- Adaptability to changing technological and ecological knowledge.
- Inquiry and research.
- Active and participatory citizenship.
- Ethical and intercultural understanding
This is the scope and sequence of our H.I.T. program. We designed activities for three different age groups: Kinder to Year 2, Year 3 to Year 5, and Year 6 to Year 8. For each group, we adapted six activities as mentioned before.
After we have narrowed down our focus and finished drafting the scope and sequence, we work on our lesson design independently for our targeted age groups.
The lessons followed the structure with the beginning of learning intention and success criteria, and we created a collaborative Padlet for learning resources. Then we have the explicit detailed instructions for introduction, main components, and conclusion.
Throughout this project, we have identified some similarities and differences of our teaching practices. These provide valuable insights for us in understanding how to incorporate the HAK.io into a traditional learning environment.
We have created a collaborative Padlet for our project. It contains the basic information of the projects and the differentiated lesson plans in different year levels.
Our “Resource” Padlet has been categorised in different year levels. We have also included the specific curriculum that we need to refer to in our lessons. It is interesting to note that we all have different types of learning resources that support students’ learning.
After we finished individual lesson design, we met together to share and discuss our insights about our lessons. It is exciting to see how we embed different learning focuses and use differentiated teaching strategies to support students’ understanding of climate change.
Let’s take walking as an example. In Kinder to Year 2, we want students to simply observe and describe the local environment, and for Year 3 to 5, we move a little bit forward by focusing on critical understanding of how the local environment affects climate change. And for middle school students, we want them to record and explain the significance of climate. As you can see that we have all focused on the same topic of walking, but with different angles or perspectives to engage students in the learning.
See HAK.io Walking Method Documented Using a Video Protocol here: https://doi.org/10.26188/25511662.v1
This image was created with the assistance of DALL·E 2.
Throughout the lesson sequence, we hope students will develop an understanding about the interconnection between places and humans.
As emphasised in VCAA (2015), it is significant for students to understand that,
“Places and the people and organisations in them are interconnected with other places in a variety of ways. These interconnections have significant influences on the characteristics of places and on the ways these characteristics change”
Learning in Geography, Victorian Curriculum F–10 was first published by the VCAA in September 2015.
Overall, this is H.I.T, through this project, we want students to explore their identities in the way that they interact with local environments. We want to use distinct teaching practices, with the incorporation of storytelling, visual arts and digital tools, to create a shared and creative learning environment for all levels of students.
Lastly, we want to say a big thank you to Kate Coleman and Sarah Healy for this fantastic WIL radical residency experience. We have learned so much about blending digital technologies with visual arts in education. Your support and guidance have been amazing, helping us to see how these tools can really enhance learning. Thank you for being there and sharing your expertise with us! Thank you SWISP Lab ❤️.