#blogtakeover | Time, Ties, and Teaching: Unpacking Pedagogies that Foster Connections

By SWISP Lab Master of Teaching Interns: Biman Cai, Billy Frost, Peiyao Qian, Mengyu Ren, Tam Thai

We each entered our WIL experience with different passions and directions, following what felt meaningful in our own teaching journeys. However, we realised that at the end of our WIL experience, our wonderings, work, and dialogue all connected with each other. We wanted to share our work with you. We are a group of five Master of Teaching candidates at the final stages of our teaching degrees at the University of Melbourne, and have spent the last two weeks speculating and working through in a living lab setting. 

Our WIL experience kicked off with an inspiring excursion to the “65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art” exhibition. From this shared experience, we developed individual projects, tailored to different year levels and topics. Despite these unique focuses, we found common ground in exploring interconnected concepts like home/family, connection/relationships, and time.

Image caption: Chat GPT 4.0 prompted ‘I want to create a poster for my classroom that says ‘This safe space can be a home away from home’ The image for this poster i’d like to reflect 5 items that my students explained: The first is a fluffy white bunny stuffed toy- perhaps with a tag with tiny writing ‘x sister’ The next is a cabinet with an array of stuffed animal toys that are collected from various countries she visits The next is a comfortable square pink cushion with a brown and white bear on it The next is a collection of personal journals to write in The last I want to be the blue bird of happiness. Can they be together centrally with a white border around the objects?’

This poster was designed as a collage of a reflective task that had our 5 participants think about an object that they have that is ‘homely’. They were asked to describe the object/s and talk about what positive emotion or memory they associate with it. Applying this to a larger classroom would include an object from each student and hopefully provoke a sense of community and homeliness.

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Meet Biman Cai

Image caption: Image based on real photos using tiktok filter

During the two week experience I designed a project about an online museum for children. The topics of this online museum were divided into 3 parts, past, present and future. This online museum includes some of the photos I took at other museums and exhibitions; some old objects and photos of myself and my friends; some photos and children’s artworks I found on the internet; and I interviewed a few children to record their ideas. I was very careful in choosing some of the artwork from the 65000 years Exhibition, considering the children’s level.

WHY?

I have observed during my placement that children have a great interest in art. In my last placement my mentor was a visual arts teacher and she designed a lot of experiences for the children about art. The children’s different abilities, feelings and emotions can be found in their different artworks. And almost every child chooses their own art activity every day. And based on my observations of children’s interest in the arts, I chose to consider how I practice diversity and inclusion education through the arts in early childhood education. Art is diverse and I want children to be able to choose different ways to express themselves.

HOW?

I hope to embed the online museum into the early childhood education centre for young children in the future. Hopefully through this experience families and children will be able to share their diverse experiences, cultures and histories, which can help create inclusive and diverse learning environments. Allowing children to learn about cultural diversity and to understand and respect it fosters empathy and enhances a sense of cultural identity and belonging. In addition, the children are encouraged to express themselves in a variety of ways throughout the experience. The children were given the option to choose from a diversity of ways to express themselves. Using language, video recording performances, recording audio, and other diverse art forms and multimodal literacy. The children’s literacy skills are developed through the expression of their ideas. The activities also allow children to discuss and exchange ideas, helping them to develop their social skills, and considering the children’s diversity of cultures helps to enhance their sense of belonging and well-being.

This is an online museum handbook. It briefly describes the museum theme and some of the processes that need to be supported by parents and children. The handbook will be given to every child and family. Follow the steps above to support us in creating the museum. In future experiences I hope to complete the creation of the museum with children and families.

Image caption: 6-page booklet production from canva’s template

Image caption: Prints from a handbook created using the canva template

I created my museum about the past, present and future based on my ideas.

I hope to design our museums with children and families in the future!

Image caption: Screenshot of the museum created using the Artsteps website

Image caption: Screenshot of the museum created using the Artsteps website

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Meet Billy Frost

Image caption: Chat GPT 4.0 generated an image to reflect Billy Frost’s memory of a tangible blue bird of happiness toy gifted to him from his grandmother. 

What if Business Management Was Taught as If the Future Depended on It?

In the SWISP lab, I found myself asking a question that wouldn’t let go: What if Business Management was taught as if the future depended on it? This inquiry began as a quiet thought, sparked by observing my own classroom and the often rigid, assessment-driven ways we “deliver” content. But through a living, arts-based exploration with peers, it grew into a vivid, disruptive vision—one that’s equal parts ethical imperative and creative provocation.

At first, I clung to initial brainstorms like anchors—strategies, concepts, deliverables. But as we were reminded, living enquiries don’t require us to stick to the plan. In fact, they thrive when we let go. What emerged instead was a layered process: a dialogue between artwork, reflection, storytelling, pedagogy, and deep feeling.

From slam poetry unpacking marketing’s manipulations, to speculative classroom postcards asking “What if…?”, the journey became one of re-seeing. What if students designed their own flashcards but used personal interests—like World of Warcraft characters—to scaffold memory and agency? What if the start of a unit wasn’t about content review, but emotional reflection? These weren’t diversions from Business Management; they were a reimagining of it.

A pivotal shift came through relational and speculative pedagogy. Conversations invited us to critique the transactional and colonial underpinnings of our systems. Why is knowledge something to be delivered? Why do we flatten identity and experience in the name of assessment? We found more meaningful answers in practices like storytelling, game design, zine-making, and visual artefacts—where every student interaction becomes a site for inquiry, empathy, and ethical reflection.

I wrote back and forth with a peer named Tam. These reflective letters offered more than support—they modeled a pedagogy of care and curiosity. We asked each other how creativity might be the method, not the reward. We imagined activities that blurred personal and academic lines—what if t-shirt designs could emerge from childlike sketches? What if a classroom felt like a home away from home?

In this space, we stopped asking “What content do I need to teach?” and started asking “What kind of world are we helping students build?” From greenwashing critiques to exploring diaspora identity through speculative memory, each step reminded us: everything is content. Every object, every feeling, every story a student brings holds potential to transform.

The “blue bird of happiness”—originally a personal symbol tied to family memory—became a metaphor for emotional presence in the classroom. When students are invited to share their homely objects, we don’t just get better engagement—we build trust, community, and belonging.

This wasn’t a move away from rigour. It was a reclamation of rigour as relational, reflective, and real. It asked: how do we teach Business Management not just to replicate systems—but to reimagine them?

The future depends on that shift.

Image caption: created Zene using poetry and collage to explore challenges of homophobia in current workplaces and then self expression in the future

Chat GPT 4.0 Image generated to ‘reflect the expressions within The Missing Receipt original poem written by Billy Frost’

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Meet Peiyao Qian

Image caption: Self-portrait generated by Chat GPT using the prompt, 
“an Asian woman with long hair and glasses”

Social Emotional Learning (SEL) program–connections between feelings, memories family and the land

I went to the Indigenous art exhibition called “65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art’. The exhibition displays a series of artefacts, such as paintings, photographs and traditional crafts. It demonstrates deep cultural connotations and Indigenous people’s strong connections to the land. Meanwhile, the exhibition shows the oppression suffered by Indigenous peoples in colonial history. Through this exhibition, I had a deep understanding of how art could be used to express Indigenous peoples’ emotions, preserve their memories and demonstrate their strong connections to the land. 

My capstone research question is how I can use arts as an effective teaching method to engage children in learning. Based on this topic and the exhibition, I started questioning myself and designing my own project.

The initial questions are:

• How can art help children learn?
• How can children use art to express themselves?
• How can art connect with time, history and emotions?
• How can indigenous perspectives be incorporated into art teaching?

In the past two weeks, I designed a social emotional learning (SEL) project for Year 3-6 students. Arts-based teaching is adopted in this project.

Through this project, students will be able to:

• identify their emotions
• explore the connections between memories, family and place
•  recognize and express their emotions about memories, family stories and the land
• appreciate diverse cultures and histories
• understand how their stories contribute to the ongoing narrative of the land

This project will help students develop the following skills:

• Critical and Creative Thinking
• Intercultural Capability
• Personal and Social Capability

The SEL project includes 5 learning activities. They are emotion cards exploration, self-history and storytelling, museum walk, artwork creation and reflection. Those activities guide students to explore different emotions, make connections between their memories, land, and family, and express their feelings through art. I created a Padlet for my project. The learning sequence and my modelled examples were displayed on it. 

A screenshot of the SEL project Padlet designed by Peiyao

In the first experience, I planned to use a series of emotion cards for the first activity to help children explore different feelings. This activity was inspired by Kate and the Emoji Stickers in HAK.io. One side of each card has an emoji with the name of it, while the other side has a question:” Can you remember a time when you felt…?” The first learning experience has 3 different activities. The first activity is guessing the emotion using emotion cards. The second activity asks students to choose an emotion card and write down the situations they had such feelings. The last activity is to create a storyboard to show a situation in which they have different feelings. 

Image caption: emotion card prototypes, designed based on free online resources. 

The second experience is to share the old artefacts from home, explore the stories and feelings behind them and create a multimodal text for them. This experience aims to have students connect their feelings to self-history.

The third experience includes two activities. The first activity is a self-directed walk under a series of guided questions, while the second one is to create a walking protocol for it. The walking protocol was inspired by “Methods” Cards in HAK.io. I did the activity and found it was a really good chance to appreciate diverse cultures and histories, as well as express our feelings about the specific artefacts that resonated with us. 

Image caption: A photo of the “Methods” Cards in SWISP Lab’s HAK.io

The fourth learning experience is to create an artwork after reading Shaun Tan’s Memorial. Through this activity, students can explore the connections between different histories and memories, as well as link their own memories and feelings to those of different cultures. I created an artwork for the activity. In this process, I found that the objects can be a kind of media to connect our feelings and memories to the land.

The last learning experience is to co-create a class exhibition where students can display their artefacts and findings in the previous activities. Questions are used to help students reflect on the whole project and gain deep understanding of the connections between feelings, memories, family and the land.

After the SEL project, I answered the questions I had asked myself at the very beginning. Art-based teaching is really effective because it provides us with a chance to explore the complex connections and feelings between family, the land and ourselves. Arts can help record and tell the past experiences and feelings through shapes, colors and symbols. In this project, the indigenous perspectives are integrated by introducing students to the indigenous art exhibitions. The self-directed walk with guided questions allows students to build their own connections with the specific artefacts or venues. Inspired by the exhibition, they are given a chance to create their own artefacts to show their memories, stories and feelings about the land.

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Meet Mengyu Ren

Image caption: the image is generated by Google Gemini based on the instruction “generate an image with simple doodle, it’s of a girl visiting an impressionism picture”.

Team formation framework in Humanities class in Secondary school—building connections through collaboration

I’ve always been drawn to pastel colours, and during my WIL experience, the French Impressionism exhibition at the NGV was on. I incorporated this style heavily into my artefact design, seeing the underlying theme of Impressionism — the transience of light and the way works are differentiated by light, atmosphere, and perspective — as a powerful echo of how diverse groups bring unique perspectives to achieve shared goals.

My project centres on developing a Team Formation Framework designed to intentionally foster connection through collaboration within a Humanities-themed learning environment. This isn’t just about throwing people into groups; it’s about strategically building teams to maximize engagement, strengthen the connection among students, enhance the connection between the teacher and student, and develop the connection from the academic environment to modern social life.

The core idea is to move beyond arbitrary grouping to create highly effective units where individuals not only contribute their skills but also build meaningful relationships. The framework provides models to choose from for creating diverse and flexible teams, best suiting the specific learning intention. This thoughtful composition ensures a richer mix of perspectives and skills, which is crucial for encouraging deeper understanding and mutual respect—key ingredients for connection.

The Workload

Starting from the exhibit, I worked according to the timeline, flexibly making changes based on feedback and suggestions from our routine morning discussions. I stored all the materials generated in Padlet.

Timeline

Day 1: Museum Immersion & Observation

Day 2: Team-Based Learning (TBL) Theory Research

Day 3: Framework & Section Drafting

Day 4: Develop TBL Models & Applications

Day 5: Proclamation Textual Content

Day 6: Models Textual Content

Day 7: Reflection Card & Tier Textual Content

Day 8: Finalise Artefacts

Padlet

The Team Formation Framework

This Team Formation Framework is designed to be a foundational routine or principle implemented at the very beginning of a learning journey. It encompasses a comprehensive process alongside distinct, flexible elements: a proclamation, diverse models, structured reflection, a tiered structure, and a comprehensive brochure. Each of these components can be applied independently as needed, offering adaptability within the classroom. 

The Proclamation

Image caption: The Proclamation, designed by Mengyu on Canva.

The framework’s introduction to students begins with a proclamation, which establishes its principles as if they were a legal document.

Models

Image caption: Model card, designed by Mengyu on Canva.

The framework introduces four distinct models for team formation. Students aren’t just passive recipients; they’re actively encouraged to critique, refine, and even invent new models, fostering a dynamic and adaptable approach to teamwork.

Each model comes with its own “model card”. These cards clearly outline the key components of the model, ensuring students understand the expectations when applying it. They also highlight the strengths to leverage and the potential challenges to mitigate, empowering students to use each model effectively. To boost engagement and recall, each model card features a catchy slogan, making the concepts more attractive and memorable for students as they familiarize themselves with and reinforce their understanding of the models.

Reflection

Image caption: Reflection card, designed by Mengyu on Canva.

The reflection stage is a cornerstone of the framework. It facilitates formative feedback, offering valuable insights for both students and teachers.

For students, reflection is a powerful tool for personal growth, cultivating self-reflection and meta-cognition. It prompts them to consider their contributions, their team’s dynamics, and their individual learning journey. For teachers, it’s an essential mechanism for understanding the effectiveness of the models used and gaining deeper insights into classroom dynamics.

Beyond individual and instructional benefits, reflection directly scaffolds the framework’s evolution. The feedback gathered during this stage directly fuels the refinement of existing models and inspires the creation of new ones, ensuring the framework remains dynamic and responsive to the learning environment.

Tiered Structure

Image caption: Tiered Structure diagram, designed by Mengyu on Canva.

The framework incorporates a tiered structure, thoughtfully designed to benefit both students and teachers. This multi-level approach provides a transparent roadmap, significantly reducing confusion and promoting consistent application of the framework’s principles.

For students, this tiered design facilitates progressive skill development, gradually increasing their agency and capacity for self-assessment. It directly fosters meta-cognition, a crucial element for cultivating independent, lifelong learners who can critically evaluate their own learning processes.

On the teacher’s end, the tiered structure simplifies the provision of scaffolding and differentiated support. It makes it easier to offer targeted feedback and accurately evaluate student progress, ensuring every learner receives the precise support they need to succeed. 

The Comprehensive Brochure

Image caption: The Comprehensive Brochure, designed by Mengyu on Canva.

The textual content of the previously mentioned artefacts is intentionally simplified to ensure key concepts are crystal clear for students.

Crucially, all elements of the framework are incorporated into this brochure, providing a detailed, in-depth explanation of its principles, models, and processes. This makes the brochure an invaluable resource for teachers, parents, and high-level students who desire a more profound understanding of the framework’s design and intent. 

Classroom Visuals: Bringing the Framework to Life

Image caption: painting by Mengyu

To truly embed the Team Formation Framework within the learning environment, I envision transforming the classroom walls into a dynamic display of its principles.

Ideally, the introduction and experience of these visuals can be seamlessly integrated through a collaborative painting activity. This activity would be designed to guide students through an application of all models of team formation presented in the framework. As students engage in the painting process, they’ll not only create a piece of art but also directly experience the nuances of each team structure. The final collective painting will then serve as the background for the assembly of the framework’s artifacts, culminating in a powerful and aesthetically pleasing representation of collaborative learning prominently displayed on the classroom wall.

Conclusion

In essence, this Team Formation Framework provides a blueprint for intentionally cultivating environments where collaboration isn’t just a buzzword, but a lived experience that genuinely fosters stronger connections in a broad scope in class with diverse activities and topics.

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Meet Tam Thai

Image caption: A doodle from Ichiko Aoba’s Lyric Book

Throughout my WIL internship, I worked closely with Billy Frost and other colleagues in the SWISP Living Lab space. I wanted my experience to be free-flowing and full of learning and discovery. I was open to whatever creative inquiry the internship might take me. Billy and I began with the idea of space and place, and how these might help cultivate a sense of home, belonging, and safety within a classroom. How can we cater this to new and experiential learning?

Postcard

Image caption: collectables – a postcard designed by Tam

My process began with a postcard. I wanted to showcase a sense of home, belonging and how that would translate into a classroom.

I wanted to link my postcard to a memory that I have experienced and lived through. The photo was taken in February of this year during the celebration of my birthday with my family. Something that I noticed from this photo were the mismatched plates. This is reflective of my family and how they have always bought secondhand things – how the plates have come from previous owners and different homes – and that our home is a culmination of things collected over the years. 

The poem symbolises that although we are mismatched in ideals, values, we do come together at times.

I also added little doodles to create a sense of childlike-ness. A reminder that classrooms can also hold that same feeling. A place where old and new, structured and loose, can co-exist.

Letters to One Another ✰

Billy and I also wrote hand-written letters to one another (four in total), and took the time to respond to one another. The letters were honest, reflective, and validating. My thoughts were always half-formed and flowed as they came. Something interesting was that our energy levels oddly matched throughout the WIL experience. 

Mini Me

A project I’ve started, which I want to continue and finish – is called “mini me”. It is an exploratory project about me. About looking inward, in third-person – through this character who I refer to as mini me. 

Image caption: mini me – character design by Tam

This animation is a quiet journey through memory. It is a symbolic reflection of my experience moving through different stages of schooling. Rather than focusing on what happened, I wanted to express how each phase felt in my body and mind. Kindergarten reminded me of the comfort of fruit, scones, cold rolls, and mum’s hands. Primary school was warm, where I felt free of judgement, and didn’t think twice about coming. High school felt very quiet externally, but loud and conflicting internally. A place where I had to put on a facade of some sort. University felt fresh and invigorating, but the thought of failure was and is also overwhelming.

The floating girl (a small version of me) drifts through each space and fragment of time. She doesn’t speak, but she remembers. I feel like memory isn’t just about recalling events, but for me it was easier to recall the associated emotions and feelings. My emotions felt more vivid and real to me.

Image caption: mini me storyboard and brainstorm by Tam

Here is a poem I wrote to accompany the project:

i began as a breath,
a girl without weight.

kindergarten smelled like fresh fruits,
mum’s arms enveloping me,
the world soft and sweet.

next, we ran.
grass on our knees,
sun on our backs,
laughter spilling over naturally

then, mirrors whispered versions of me
that i couldn’t choose.
so i kept walking

A draft of my animation so far

A soundscape I composed which I would like to accompany my animation

Conversations with One Another

A big part of my WIL experience was also exchanging inspiring and reflective dialogue with colleagues at SWISP Lab.

Some key takeaways I had are documented below:

• Speculative – is all about letting yourselves go and being free
• A living inquiry has no start nor end – it is free-flowing
• I felt like she (Kate) unlocked a padlock, attached to a door, to a whole new world and insight. Everything that I have ever wondered, now I feel like has substance and a reason/purpose.
• I realise I don’t want to separate myself from my teaching – my lived experiences, beliefs, and values shape what I create for others
• I want to let go of thinking in terms of expert/novice. Instead, thinking – who am I in relation to others? I am not below or above anyone.

My Further Wonderings for the Future

• How do I intervene on myself? How do I undo myself? How do I self-regulate? How do I set up a space to co-regulate?
• I’ve been reminded that teaching is not something I perform separately from who I am. It is woven through my lived experience.
• I want to look inward – to understand where I come from, how I’ve been shaped, and how that affects the way I exist in the world
• I have come to understand that I don’t have all the answers, and I will keep on discovering the more I do, make, and experience
• I want to hold space for ruptures – so that honest learning can come through