Waitakere College (TLIF 5-076) - Developing learner engagement and agency through collaborative inquiry into integrated project-based local curriculum design in authentic contexts Publications
Publication Details
Project Reference: Waitakere College (TLIF 5-076) - Teachers from three disciplines were interested in co-designing a cross-curricular course, teaching drama, visual art, and technology using the context of ‘alternative futures’. They hoped that this would focus students’ attention on the disciplinary knowledge and skills they were developing as they worked towards becoming drama practitioners, visual artists, and technologists.
Author(s): (Inquiry Team) Initially, Joelle Bunt led this project and, later, Jordan Foulds took on this task.
Date Published: February 2019
Overview
They further hoped that the students would find the natural connections that exist between these three disciplines. However, low student engagement in the futures context, staffing changes due to maternity leave, and the reality of the change to our ‘nows’ and our futures brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic led to a sequence of changes.
The project re-oriented to a focus on the benefits of the arts and how they enable self-expression and storytelling. The teachers found that this provided an authentic context for student learning that was highly engaging and oriented students towards an understanding of the deeper intention of the arts in enabling creative self-expression. The teachers also learned about the importance of selecting a context for learning that they themselves understood and could connect with and of aligning their pedagogical approaches when engaging in cross-curricular teaching.
Originally the unit of work that we wanted to develop and make available to teachers was a futures focused unit that could combine any three disciplines. However, our focus has now shifted to specifically look at the role of art and drama as a therapeutic tool when the unknown does happen. … Drama and art have proven to be powerful tools for helping students cope during traumatic times; therefore, the resources we want to create are to encourage other teachers to utilise art and drama in their own classrooms, even if they are teaching a different discipline.
Teacher reflection
The inquiry story
This project involved the heads of the technology, drama, and visual arts departments and two groups of students. The first group participated in a pilot programme in 2019, and the second group enrolled in a newly designed half-year Year 10 course in 2020.
What was the focus?
This project arose out of awareness that often, students are unable to distinguish disciplinary learning from the context in which it is being developed. For example, when the black civil rights movement in the Unites States was used as the context for storytelling through drama, students could talk about what they learned about the movement but could not articulate what they had learned about the storytelling processes used by drama practitioners. Further, students were not making connections between what they were learning within different learning areas.
The project team wanted to explore an interdisciplinary approach where the same learning context would be used across three different disciplines. They intended to be explicit about the disciplinary approaches being used so that students would learn to ‘be’ artists, technologists, and drama practitioners, rather than simply learn something about how to ‘do’ art, technology, or drama.
The team developed the following innovation statement:
We would like to know if an interdisciplinary approach to teaching visual arts, drama, and the technologies within a coherent context will have an impact on students’ ability to better understand the individual disciplines and the similarities, connections, and differences between them for our year 10 students.
What did the teachers try?
The team intended that the new option would utilise Professor James Dator’s Alternative Futures approach (2009) as the learning context within which the students would explore the roles of technologist, artist, and drama practitioner. They would use the four generic alternative futures Dator proposes (transformation, collapse, continuation, and discipline) to develop four inter-disciplinary learning experiences. Through their project, the team hoped to create a cross-curricular model of teaching that any discipline might adopt and adapt. They envisaged that this would comprise of tasks, activities, and strategies focused upon the future.
The team ran a pilot programme in 2019 and used what was learned to help inform the design of a new Year 10 option course to be offered in 2020. In the end, they ran four inquiry cycles.
In the project’s first cycle of inquiry, team members engaged with research about the Alternative Futures method, got to know about each other’s pedagogy and how they could complement each other, and explored their own and their students’ perceptions of what it means to be a technologist, artist, or drama practitioner. They ran two one-day trials of the course they were envisaging, with learning from the first day informing what was planned for the second. Activities included having students develop a futuristic world and tell a story that solved a design problem in this place.
Students in the pilot told the team that the futures focus felt more like a social sciences project than a creative arts, drama, or technology project, and the teachers observed that students in a group comprising a high percentage of gifted and talented students got more out of the experience than their peers. They needed to re-develop their ideas to ensure the disciplinary learning was more obvious and that all students could enjoy a balance of challenge and success.
The new Year 10 course, entitled Creative Futures, was launched in Term 1 2020. The first part was led by the technology teacher, as she was preparing to go on maternity leave. The three teachers co-taught the class for all of Term 1, observing each other and thinking about how to adapt to each other’s pedagogical style as well as how to teach within the Alternative Futures and cross-disciplinary model they were seeking to create. Student interviews were videotaped to get their perspectives.
Learning activities included:
- Futures Wheels: mapping out possible future scenarios
- Signals Treasure Hunt: students finding clues around the school signaling possible changes (for example, rising sea levels and the legalisation of cannabis) as prompts to provoke thought and conversation
- The Thing from The Future: a card game that combines random sets of factors to encourage students to think about different types of future.
Students created physical outcomes that included:
- a model home from an ‘alternative future’ designed and built by students in small groups. (design visual communication outcome)
- photographs of the alternative future home (visual arts outcome)
- character design and storytelling derived from the model and photography (drama outcome).
Despite the adjustments that had been made and the teachers’ own enthusiasm for the new approach, many students still felt that the course had more of a social studies orientation than an orientation to creativity. They did not engage and, within just two weeks, the course’s roll halved from 18 to 9. This was disheartening for both the teachers and the remaining students.
The teachers responded by talking the issues through with the remaining students, their colleagues, and a member of TLIF’s monitoring team. They realised that the Alternative Futures method was not resonating with the students and that none of the teachers felt a great deal of confidence with teaching it. They needed to work with the students to re-direct the programme, setting outcomes and designing tasks over which the students felt ownership.
The re-design involved maintaining the Accessible Futures context but simplifying the content and re-directing the focus to the role of visual arts and drama in the community. The students would be challenged to create art and drama that would tell stories around the theme of an alternative future. However, with the Covid-19 lockdown, these plans needed to be put aside. Instead, the teachers’ priorities shifted to student wellbeing. The students were given small artistic storytelling tasks that allowed them to be creative and express their lockdown experience though a range of media. With only six weeks left when school re-opened, the final part of the course continued this focus on the alternative future the world the students were experiencing, rather than alternative futures they could imagine. Activities included:
- “quaranzines” (quarantine magazines)
- scriptwriting and storyboarding various quarantine experiences
- a lockdown photography challenge.
Student voice data was collected and analysed with reference to research by Peter O’Connor into the role the arts played in helping Christchurch students deal with trauma following the earthquakes. Overall, it was apparent that students were far more engaged with the learning in this cycle and were thinking critically about the role of the arts in navigating change and challenge and improving their own wellbeing. They wanted to share this with their peers and were eager to conduct a small social experiment where they reached out through Instagram to quiz other students on their lockdown experiences. They collated what they learned to create stop motion animated films capturing the essence of the lockdown experience for a Waitakere College student. They had lengthy discussions about the new and unexpected ‘future’ that was unfolding. They considered how important it is for people to work through their thoughts and feelings and to preserve the historical moment through storytelling.
The final day of the course involved a trip to Auckland Art Gallery to attend the exhibit, Civilisation Photography Now. This exhibition illustrated our increasingly global, connected society, and encouraged viewers to consider where we live, how we consume, and how we travel, learn, explore, and control. The students were able to view the exhibits through the lens of their prior learning from the Alternative Futures topics.
The final part of the project happened after the course had finished, as the teachers reflected back upon what they had experiences and learned and sought to build upon it. They returned to the mission of creating resources for future cross-curricular teaching, but the focus was on the concept of ‘art as therapy’ for students experiencing traumatic events. They engaged in further professional learning, developed a reflective document and video blog capturing what they and their students had learned, and created a presentation for sharing within and beyond the school community.
What happened as a result of this innovation?
As described above, many students were disappointed in the course and left. The Alternative Futures context was not appealing in its original form. It felt too much like another social studies course and students felt it did not enable them to be creative in the ways they had expected. By paying attention to what the students were saying, working with them to re-design the course, and then re-orienting it again when the pandemic hit, the teachers achieved some valuable outcomes in terms of their own practice and for the students who remained in the course till the end. These included:
- increasing teacher-teacher and teacher-student collaboration
- growing students’ confidence to express their learning preferences
- while students did not necessarily make the desired shift from “doing art” to “thinking like artists”, all students shifted from a focus on assessment and physical outcomes to an understanding about the value of the artistic process for self-expression and wellbeing
- students connected to the idea of being creative rather than engaging in one particular artistic discipline
- students enjoyed their experience and wished it could have gone on for the whole year.
What did they learn?
The teachers learned some deep lessons as they repeatedly adapted to challenge and change. These included the realisation that for students to engage in learning, their teachers first needed to understand and connect with its content. If the learning context is ‘alternative futures’, then these teachers learned that they needed to upskill themselves around the use of digital tools.
The teachers gained insight into the therapeutic benefits of arts and drama when the focus is on the creative process of storytelling. The arts can foster wellbeing, even in times of crisis. They teachers are now actively growing their skills and knowledge in this area.
The project reinforced the value of team teaching and collaboration. However, it also demonstrated that for this approach to be successful, the teachers involved need to use pedagogical strategies that are coherent and aligned.
Inquiry team
Initially, Joelle Bunt led this project and, later, Jordan Foulds took on this task. Their colleague on the inquiry team was Genevieve Craig.
The project’s critical friend was Chris Clay (Education Unleashed).
Additional expertise was accessed from Di Cavallo (Hobsonville Point Secondary School).
For further information
If you would like to learn more about this project, please contact the project leader, Joelle Bunt, bt@waitakerecollege.school.nz
Reference list
Candy, S., & Kornet, K. (2019). Turning foresight inside out: An introduction to ethnographic experiential futures. Journal of Futures Studies, 23, 3–22.
Situation Lab: The Thing from The Future: http://situationlab.org/project/the-thing-from-the-future/
Dator, J. (2002). Advancing futures: Futures studies in higher education. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger.
Education Gazette editors. (2020). Arts support innovation and wellbeing. Education Gazette, 99(9).
Mathewman, S., & Morgan, J. (2014). Sharpening New Zealand’s future focus. Future Education 1, 24–32.
Moore, J., & Robinson, S. (2008). “Students first” and nurturing networks: Visualising positive futures for New Zealand secondary students. set: Research Information for Teachers 2, 22–28.
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