Teaching & Learning | Case Studies of Integrated Teaching | Wananami Remote Community School

Case Studies - Wananami Remote Community School
Integration Through an Horticultural Program

• Wananami Remote Community School
• The School Development Plan
• Integration at Wananami
• Other Technology and Enterprise Related Happenings at the School
• Reflections
• Acknowledgement

Wananami Remote Community School

Wananami Remote Community School is 305 km from Derby in the Kupungarri Community on Mt Barnett Station. The road house is the only significant building at Wananami apart from the community dwellings and the school and its two school houses. The community is dry, and consists mainly of older people and children, as most of the middle generation are in Derby. With a muster scheduled to take place not long after our visit in June 1996, there were more young males than usual in the community who were getting ready to be part of the mustering team.

There are four teachers, including the Principal, Mr Lex Leslie, and during the week of the visit, an average of 30 students attended the school, including two belonging to Mr Leslie and his wife, Nuala, who is the Year 4-7 teacher. The school roll is more extensive than this, but many children attend irregularly, sometimes attending other schools and then returning to the community. The K-3 class has a full time teacher and a full-time Aboriginal Education Worker, and the secondary students, in Years 8-11, are taught by Mr Gordon Muir. Mr Leslie has a 0.7 teaching load and fulfils the role of support teacher, allowing the others to have their time for duties other than teaching.

During my week at the school I was able to speak with all the teachers and observe the school in operation. It tended to be quite a centre of activity for the community with a playgroup coming in one day. Two visitors staying for a week elicited a lot of interest and many children were very keen to talk to us and asked lots of questions about our families and why we were there.

The School Development Plan

Mr Leslie's priority is to involve the community as much as possible in school-related issues. The school's development plan is centered around the community's expressed desire that the school is there to teach the children to read, write and speak good English and to do mathematics. The School Purpose Statement reads:

In this school English, as Standard Australian English (SAE), is taught as a second language. There is a LOTE program which teaches Ngarinyin, the indigenous language of the area, which, although spoken among adults in the community, is generally not known by the children, even though they have the cultural background for this. The home language, which is usually their first language, tends to be Kriol.

As part of his role as an educational advocate, Mr Leslie tries to encourage the caregivers to talk to the children at home in Ngarinyin to help facilitate the learning of the language. LOTE classes are taken on a weekly basis by a local elder. As the elder is also in demand for consultation with regard to land rights and other community business, these commitments mean that she isn't always able to come to the school. When she is not available, Mr Leslie fills in with a horticultural program which continues at other times as well.

Other Technology and Enterprise-Related Happenings at the School

In general the program is eclectic, using ideas and opportunities as they arise.

• An aboriginal police aide from Derby comes in to the school to take vehicle maintenance classes with the secondary students, and included in this will be aspects of mathematics concerning fuel, how much is needed to get to Derby, for example.

• The Principal is presently setting up equipment for sports practice and students help with this.

• Secondary students are taught to use phone, fax, photocopier, and have gained certification to deal with this kind of information technology. Students also learn about taking messages etc.

• Secondary students are responsible for the school's periodic newsletter, which involves a range of different skills particularly related with the information strand of technology.

Reflections

The nature of the school population and the small size of the school make it very easy for integration to occur. Because each class contains students from at least three year levels, teachers can organise a range of within-class groupings, for example, based on different levels of basic skills, which may cut across years. The small school and the close links among the community mean that every student is known to every teacher.

Communication among teachers is facilitated both in school and out, as they all live in the school grounds. Opportunities to vary the program can be taken if they arise without disturbing other teachers. Integration is so fundamental to the various programs, that it is barely noticeable among different subjects, simply that language is the basis for most activities.

A major difficulty teachers face is the transient nature of the students. Intermittent attendance makes it difficult to plan long term projects as students may not be there to finish them. Further, long absences invariably result in a deterioration of skills which have to be refreshed when the child returns to school. Because SAE is a second language in the school, the overall focus is developing literacy and numeracy and other subjects are vehicles for this main objective.

Thus integration in Science, Mathematics and Technology & Enterprise has reached a high level through the need to develop language skills, rather than a deliberate attempt to integrate the three subjects. In fact, sometimes Science and Technology & Enterprise are such integral concepts that they become implicit in the everyday context in ways that are meaningful to these students.

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank all of the teachers at the school for their cooperation in the preparation of this case study.