Teaching & Learning | Case Studies of Integrated Teaching | Wananami RCS | Integration at Wananami

Case Studies - Wananami Remote Community School
Integration at Wananami

In this school, everything is integrated with language. Because SAE is not the first language for the children and they are also learning Ngarinyin, opportunities are taken in every class to try to facilitate the development of language, and so all subjects are taught with this perspective. One of the integrated programs which clearly involves Science and Technology & Enterprise, but which also integrates language is the Horticultural Program run by the Principal. It stands out because the evidence of it is easy to see in the school grounds.

• The Horticultural Program
  
• Other Integrated Programs
  
• Integration in the Secondary Class
  
• Integration in Years 4-7
  

Integration at Wananami - The Horticultural Program

Mr Leslie describes the nature of the activities and programs he does in horticulture as needing to:

• Be meaningful.
• Be enjoyable.
• Allow maximum participation.
• Be able to be carried by the children on their own, that is, they don't rely on the teacher having to be there.

To do the outside garden work, students are divided into groups, usually by class, with the K-3 operating as a single group. During our visit, the young children were planting out paw-paws which had been grown from seeds collected last year, watering newly planted seedlings, and putting in mulch, etc. The other students are able to work individually or in smaller groups on various tasks.

The older students, especially, do written work associated with the horticultural program, keeping a journal or log in which to write about their activities, as well as various associated language activities. According to the season and what is happening in the garden, physical work may take precedence over the written work. As well as Science, Technology & Enterprise and Language, other subjects were integrated with ease. For example, the young children were counting out handfuls of organic fertiliser to add to the soil in which the paw-paws were being planted.

There was a garden area near the demountable building which housed the K-3 class, the library and the staffroom. Here bananas and sweet potatoes were still growing, but this old garden had become too shady because the surrounding trees had grown, so a new vegetable garden area was about to be developed where more traditional vegetables would be grown. By the end of the week, two loads of top soil had been delivered and the older students were beginning to remove the roots and spread out the new soil.

The long term plan is to garden here on a permaculture basis, using minimum artificial fertiliser, using mulch to smother weeds, and cattle dung etc., but in the shorter term, some fertilisers were being used to get growth early for short term goals for the students.

The main threat to the viability of the garden is the cattle that roam freely in the community. The school buildings have a sturdy fence to keep them out, and each of the school houses is fenced for this reason. Vegetables and fruit trees grown in the community are soon consumed by the cattle.

Integration at Wananami - Other Integrated Programs

LOTE uses Science and Technology as context very frequently. For example, the classes have discussed fire as part of both Science and Language. When students visit the bush with their LOTE teacher and other community members, they learn about different kinds of wood and their uses, for example, which wood gives good coals for cooking, which is the best for heating, etc.

Colours and fishing are other topics discussed in LOTE and the uses of different kinds of words discussed. For example, there are words for only four colours (black, white, yellow, red) in Ngarinyin, where as SAE has many. Fishing is prevalent in the community, so students can talk about what kinds of fish congregate when, where and why, what to use for bait, and so on.

Integration at Wananami - Integration in the Secondary Class

All of the integration between subjects in the secondary class is done via language. Rather than planning to link Mathematics, Science and Technology & Enterprise explicitly with each other, the secondary teacher (whose training is in languages) ties up all other subject areas through language.

In Science, during classwork on space, students looked at the Hale-Bopp comet and linked it with the stories of the Wandjina (there is a Wandjina Gorge some distance away). They discussed time and space, its vastness and where humans fit. The students found this difficult but their reactions were interesting in terms of how they saw themselves in it. One student said, Oh well - we're here!

The teacher has a project planned to make benches out of local natural wood, using photography to record the sequence of work. This project will link with language as well because the words used in Design & Technology and Photography will become list words in English classes and the procedure for building the benches will be written up as one of the genres in English. As in other classes, most of what is done relates to language one way or another.

Integration at Wananami - Integration in Years 4-7

This class has a specific Science program which all the students in the class do together. Recent topics and their integration with other subjects include magnetism, linking with the globe and the world in Society & Environment, and in Mathematics students investigated the effect on compasses, directions and so on. This topic continued for some time as distance and direction are very important to the students.

Another topic was light, linking work on angles with Mathematics. Oral language is very important in association with Science because many science-related words are quite new to the students. For example, magnet was a new word to the class, many at first linking it to the popular magnum ice cream available at the road house!

Students love to do any kinds of hands-on activities, such as with electricity and light. Everything is new to the students, partly because of language, new words, but also things like magnets and electricity. For ideas, Mrs Leslie has sometimes looked at the I Do Science books but hasn't used the worksheets in them. When she arrived two years ago, she began with the local environment, having students talk about birds, etc.

Students are very observant of their local environment and Mrs Leslie tries to emphasise the local environment in Science. Last year she did a topic on rocks, and talked about colour and texture. Interestingly, students didn't seem to have their own names for rocks, although they have names for other parts of their environment.

Another successful topic last year was based on insects and it went on for a term. Students would bring in things they found at any time, day or night, to Mrs Leslie. When you live in a community school, the boundaries are rather flexible.

The class does something on plants each year, always germinating mung beans seeds which the students then like to eat. Last year the class developed some hanging baskets (which were still on the verandah) when they were propagating cuttings from Mrs Leslie's garden. As an example of the literal way children use the SAE, Mrs Leslie described how, when the class was watering the hanging baskets on the verandah, she asked Nigel to go into the classroom to see if the plants in there were dry. Nigel was found with his hand in the fish tank, and was able to report that the (plastic) plants in there were good and wet. What about the ones in the pots? Nigel felt their leaves and reported they weren't wet.

Technology & Enterprise is usually combined with Mathematics; making models of the classroom and working with dimensions were two things they had done. Transiency is a problem with continuity in projects which require making things. Two weeks is about as long as a project can be planned as some students leave for a while or altogether, new students come but don't want to pick up where the others are.

Problem-solving is directed at practical problems, often on an informal basis, where is the best place to put the chairs, and so on. This isn't usually done as an explicit part of Technology & Enterprise, but situations are taken advantage of as they arise.

Students always make a written report of what they have done in Science in their Science book. Unless students talk about the activities before (what do you think will happen?) and after (why do you think that happened?), Mrs Leslie believed that students won't really learn much. Often a class sentence is constructed through discussion and written on the board and then students can write this down if they can't think of their own, or others can write something else if they wish. Thus both oral and written language is central to everything which is done in the class.