humsteach

http://strawpoll.me/3843004

Spatial Education and technology Scoop.it
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Email contact:

malcolm.mcinerney@flinders.edu.au

What do you think about HASS

The Bali 9 prisoners should be executed

I read the Backward Design article

http://strawpoll.me/3843042

I find education theory really

http://strawpoll.me/3843034

The thought of teaching my first class by myself

http://strawpoll.me/3843055

In relation to the lecture this week, I
http://strawpoll.me/3843065

The issue of assessment

* Thanks to Sue Jones from the DECD assessment and reporting team for helping out with our lecture and tutorials this week on assessment. Here is the link to the DECD assessment engagement resources.

* Here is the link to the Powerpoint to this weeks assessment lecture. Have another look at the lecture and think about your assessment philosophy.

Curriculum making

http://www.geography.org.uk/cpdevents/curriculummaking/curriculummakingexplained

What is curriculum making?

Curriculum making is the creative act of interpreting a curriculum specification or scheme of work and turning it into a coherent, challenging, engaging and enjoyable scheme of work.
Curriculum making is a job that really never ends and lies at the heart of good teaching.

When educators talk about curriculum making we refer to the creation of interesting, engaging and challenging educational encounters which draw upon teacher knowledge and skills, the experiences of students and the valuable subject resources of the subject. Curriculum making is concerned with holding all this in balance and as a teacher you play a key role.

Why curriculum making?

The potential and promise of a subject is compromised if it is seen only as an inert or static 'knowledge-to-be-delivered'. Covering the syllabus is just the mechanics of teaching and is not the same as making the curriculum.

Curriculum making is about bringing a curriculum alive. It is about enacting the curriculum and giving it purpose. Geography and history are resources that can enable students to better understand the world and their place in it. It aims for a deep understanding.

The inquiry-led approach lies at the heart of teaching and learning in the Australian Curriculum: geography and History. Humanities teachers perform a delicate balancing act, drawing upon the student's experiences, the subject resource and their own knowledge and craft skills.

The essence of curriculum making

The following diagram captures the essence of curriculum making. Think of the diagram as a kind of 'corrective', always aiming for somewhere in the middle. Engage with the subject, listen to your students and question the value of what you are teaching.

Diagram from the Geography Association UK

The inquiry approach contains four central aspects including the creation of a 'need to know' through the use of an engaging stimulus. It then develops through the collection and use of data, processing and making sense of that data and finally reflecting on learning in order to apply it to future enquiries.

This process has been captured in a single diagram (adapted from Roberts, 2003).

During the tutorials we will use the deconstructing triangle for geography and history to start the exciting process of curriculum making within the context of backward designing the curriculum.

To assess or not to assess?

Image above: Link to the Powerpoint from the 3 March assessment lecture

Related sites to Humsteach blog
Spatialworlds
Australian Curriculum Portal
Geogaction
DECD Learning Resources for Australian Curriculum
DECD Achievement Standards Charts
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
Geography Teachers Association of South Australia
History Teachers Association of South Australia
History Teachers Association of Australia

Scoop.it

Spatial Education and technology Scoop.it
Just real interesting Scoop.it

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Email contact:

malcolm.mcinerney@flinders.edu.au

The issue of assessment

* Thanks to Sue Jones from the DECD assessment and reporting team for helping out with our lecture and tutorials this week on assessment. Here are the links to the DECD assessment engagement resources and to the large chart of Australian Curriculum Achievement Standards that Sue used today.

* Here is the link to the Powerpoint from the 3 March assessment lecture. Have another look at the lecture and think about your assessment philosophy.

Sunday, March 1, 2015

What do you really really think?

Image above: Mapping terror.

Related sites to Humsteach blog
Spatialworlds
Australian Curriculum Portal
Geogaction
DECD Learning Resources for Australian Curriculum
DECD Achievement Standards Charts
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
Geography Teachers Association of South Australia
History Teachers Association of South Australia
History Teachers Association of Australia

Scoop.it

Spatial Education and technology Scoop.it
Just real interesting Scoop.it

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Email contact:

malcolm.mcinerney@flinders.edu.au

* Course details on FLO

* Assessment lecture 3/3/15

You think what?

"A curriculum is not value-free, as values and attitudes cannot be divorced from content."

The Shape of the Australian Curriculum: Geography January 2011

HASS subjects and their teaching is not value free. It is almost impossible not to be political in some way when discussing HASS topics.

As Robert Butler was quoted as saying in the Economist in 2010:

“It is getting harder and harder in conversation to raise one or other of the most basic subjects in geography—agriculture, glaciation, rivers and population—without a flicker of panic crossing the other person’s face. You are no longer talking about a neutral subject.”

HASS has the potential to be relevant, dynamic and challenging for students in the classroom through providing the opportunity to develop a political frame around what is taught. How can we teach about water, population, migration and climate change for example without challenging students to place the discussion in a political context – that is, what do you believe is right and what are the justice and ethical beliefs that guide ones opinion on an issue.

Here are two excellent classroom polling tools to have a look at and use in our tutorial

* Straw Poll

Click on the URL's below and select your response.

* Did you like geography at school?
http://www.strawpoll.me/1759017

* What did you like about geography?
http://www.strawpoll.me/1736527

* Familiarity with the Australian Curriculum: Geography
http://www.strawpoll.me/1736411

* Engagement potential of the Australian Curriculum: Geography
http://www.strawpoll.me/1736435

* Content amount in the Australian Curriculum: Geography
http://www.strawpoll.me/1736442

* Geographical concepts in the Australian Curriculum: Geography
http://www.strawpoll.me/1736458

* Skills to start working on to teach the Australian Curriculum: Geography
http://www.strawpoll.me/1736467

* Poll everywhere

A digital tool that is a wonderful way to get students involved (all students, not just the vocal and uninhibited) in discussion of a contestable nature is Poll Everywhere. The brilliant aspect of this program is that it is easy to use, is anonymous and inclusive of all, can be used and developed in real time in the classroom and provides instant feedback (graphs, word walls etc). The program gives all students a voice so that they can express their opinion without ridicule or embarrassment. The resulting graphs and graphics provide data for class research and discussion and can be archived for comparison over time presentations. As a tool it is a great interactive way to involve the geography class in some high order thinking and discussion.
The brief video on the Poll Everywhere Home page gives an introduction to this free digital tool which can be used not only in the geography classroom but also with teachers in their professional learning in geography. Here is a Poll Everywhere document I recently used with a group of teachers working on the concepts in history and geography. All they had to do was type the URL http://www.pollev.com and start submitting their response to the questions in the document by using the codes (each code is unique and can be used only once specifically for the question - called a poll) generated by the teacher/facilitator of the question. Poll Everywhere is a great way to get discussion started in any gathering. It is certainly worth the 30 minutes to get acquainted with the tool and make the learning more interactive for participants and create some inclusive and comprehensive data for contestable discussions.

Use either Straw Poll or Poll everywhere to answer the following questions re: HASS

What subject of HASS do you like best?
Did you like Society and Environment at school?
Are you looking forward to teaching HASS?
Why do we study HASS?
Do you enjoy discussing issues?
Can you list some HASS issues?
Is there any one issue that really interests/enthuses you?
Do you have any concerns about this class and how you may proceed/succeed?
Do you have any questions re: HASS before we continue?

Sunday, February 22, 2015

Some great sites for Hums but how ...

Spatial Education and technology Scoop.it
Just real interesting Scoop.it

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Email contact:

malcolm.mcinerney@flinders.edu.au

* Course details on FLO

My Top 10 to check out

I thought I would have a play at checking out some sites of interest and use for the humanities classroom and then try to make a top 10 list. I am sure that the creative teacher could integrate them into a humanities lesson of worth.

Well, here is my top 10 for this week.

Number 1: The Traveler IQ Challenge. Great fun learning places and their location. Try it!

Number 2: Tony Cassidy has compiled a great list of online Social Studies games.

Number 3: Culture Crossing is a unique resource for information about different countries. It provides some basic demographics, but it also shares details about communication style, dress, gestures, etc. It’s unlike any other source of information about countries on the web.

Number 4: Photos that changed the world – great visuals to explore visual literacy.
• Camera Naked’s.
• Neatorame
• Jonathan Klein: Photos that changed the world is a new “TED Talk”.

Number 5: What The World Eats, an online slideshow from Time magazine that shows families from fifteen different countries, along with what they eat during one week and its cost. This site can be used to initiate a discussion on economic inequities; use in compare/contrast activities – great for the Year 9 Food topic of the Australian Curriculum: Geography.

Number 6: The Zero Footprint Kids Calculator: It would be difficult to develop a more accessible web tool for people to figure out their own ecological footprint.

Number 7: Geographical Media is an interesting site to develop media literacy and also collect data for some mapping of media coverage.

Number 8: Map Battle is a very easy-to-use tool to create geography games online.

Number 9: Geobeats is a huge collection of short travel videos from around the world.

Number 10: Visual Geography is a nice site with images, information, and quizzes about 85 countries around the world. The quizzes on each country are good, as is the feature called “Compare.” You can pick any two countries and easily compare their demographic data with a click of the mouse.

Saving the Humanities

How does a Humanities education help us to make sense of these two images?

Related sites to Humsteach blog
Spatialworlds
Australian Curriculum Portal
Geogaction
DECD Learning Resources for Australian Curriculum
DECD Achievement Standards Charts
Australian Geography Teachers' Association website
Geography Teachers Association of South Australia
History Teachers Association of South Australia
History Teachers Association of Australia

Scoop.it

Spatial Education and technology Scoop.it

Follow Spatialworlds on Twitter

Email contact:

malcolm.mcinerney@flinders.edu.au

* Course details on FLO

THE THREAT OF FOCUSSING ON UTILITARIAN EDUCATION

With today’s global competition, there is increasing concern about the nature and quality of education– should it be primarily practical and utilitarian and equipping students to be competitive in the workforce or should it rather a liberal education with broad ideas and values to prepare a well-rounded student with the capacity to be fully functional democratic citizens, prepared for life in contemporary society? For students to be successful in today’s global economy, it should be seen that utilitarian and liberal education need to be tightly coupled, and that students’ academic, developmental, interpersonal and experiential lives are entwined. Schools should move towards developing transformational learning for students and not just focus on providing knowledge and understandings based on employability. Such questioning of the utilitarian trend in education around the world is critical when we consider the decrease in curriculum time for humanities in schools and the significant drop off in the number of students studying geography in particular in the senior school in Australia and around the world.

“Transformational learning means that the “whole student” has to develop so as to prepare him or her as a thinker and citizen for a challenging world; to question and affirm or change what she or he believes; and come to a greater understanding of the complex questions of his or her own life and the lives of others than they otherwise would. By attending to both leads to transformational learning and the development of the whole person into a flourishing individual and citizen.”

Traditionally in our school system the humanities’ (history, geography, studies of society etc) have developed those capacities referred to as liberal education. Ironically, it was the liberal subjects that dominated early education! In the present economic and educational environment the humanities in the senior school are being devalued and squeezed out of the curriculum in face of utilitarian demands. In Australia the humanities is declining in schools in terms of numbers, prestige and general influence. Many young people now leave school with a scant knowledge of history, geography and our society in general (law, government etc). The impact is particularly serious in the senior secondary year that provides a sophisticated understanding of the humanities for young people. The utilitarian demands on a young person when choosing subjects has resulted in significant reduction of the perceived ‘non employment direct’ subjects such as history, geography etc (in fact these subjects do have significant and much needed career pathways but often not seen as direct and thus not promoted as getting a student a job). As this blog has highlighted and discussed over the past 4 years, the opportunities in the spatial industry is enormous and subjects such as geography and history have an important role to play in developing student knowledge, skills and capacities in-line with the needs of that industry.

Australians hold what appear to be conflicting aspirational and practical notions of the purposes and value of a schooling. Economists and corporate leaders refer to this function of education as the development of human capital.
“…education is more than preparing for a job; it should be for acquiring the knowledge, skills, competencies, values, dispositions and capacities for many life roles in a world of inevitable change and that this is ultimately the more “practical” preparation for life.”
Anecdotally the trend away from the liberal humanities in school education, towards the demands of a utilitarian education, in particular in senior secondary, is common throughout the western world and similar OECD countries to Australia. There is a need to get quantitative and substantiated data on the trend away from the humanities and to research what other countries are doing to arrest the trend away from the humanities as highly respected (in number and prestige) subjects in schools. Those involved in humanities education consider that the trend away from the humanities towards utilitarian education in our schools (and universities) is undermining and threatening the development of a ‘well-rounded, thinking, socially analytical young citizen ready for the demands of the 21st Century globalised world.
Here are two really interesting articles from the UK re: importance of geography and diminishing numbers. Seems that the drift to utilitarian education is happening everywhere. Geographers need to be strategic and work towards reversing this trend.

1. "Without geography, the world would be a mystery to us"
Geography is the subject that contributes more than any other to young people’s knowledge of the world, writes David Lambert.

2. "History and geography 'diminishing' in schools", says head
Subjects such as English, history and geography are being marginalised as schools ditch academic rigour in favour of “accessibility”, according to a leading headmistress.

The irony is that geography and the associated spatial technology tools it uses are seen as a non-vocational area of study and just a nice subject to do for those interested. As this blog repeatedly highlights, geography is a great humanities subject for young people to do as citizens now and in the future but it also is a subject with increasing vocational opportunities in the branches of geography (climatology, economic analysis, planning, environmental management, disaster mitigation etc etc) and the related areas of the spatial industry which continues to say that they have a human resources shortage. Geography is also a subject which goes somewhere in the world of employment. There is a lot of work to be done with subject counselors, vocational consultants, parents and the community to get the message across that geography and all the knowledge, skills and capacities it develops in young people is and should be promoted as a learning area with great (and increasing) vocational opportunity.

21st Century Hums