[Music plays. Sounds of children playing. On-screen text: Enrichment designed to foster high ability in the social domain]
Maggie Ryan (Leader Teacher/Global Perspectives, Tarneit Rise Primary School): We started the Global Perspectives in 2020 with eleven students, and then last year we had sixty students and this year we’re now at eighty students.
Global Perspectives has evolved from being, sort of… I was leading the eleven [students] and we had a similar topic together at the same time. Now we have a sustainability group, a conflict resolution group, so there’re different domains that children can then decide where their passions are and then have teachers who can guide that support.
[Music plays. Classroom sounds]
Jahnavi Bhalani (Year 6 student): Rights have been about, like, helping humans all over the world and having them let them have their own rights. Since about the Ukraine and Russia war that’s been going on, we’ve been helping refugees that are coming from Ukraine and Russia, like all over the world.
This year we had a loose-change challenge, where, like, every loose change in everyone’s home, they bring it to school, and then we gather all of that. And then the money that we’ve collected, we hand it to a fund, like an organisation called the ASRC [Asylum Seeker Resource Centre]. And then that’s the organisation that helps refugees, let them have food and shelter for free.
Aparajita Ryali (Year 5 student): I’m in Sustainability with my amazing group! So we create projects together to help our environment in sustainability for us. What we have done so far is our nude-food challenge and our plant competition, which is actually present now. It’s about saving the world and you can actually really help by doing just a little bit.
[Sounds of children playing]
Carmen Barnes (Global Perspectives Teacher, Tarneit Rise Primary School): In the group that I run, which is sustainability, there’s fourteen students and we’re really a close group. The students get lots and lots of opportunities to show leadership because of the things that we’ve done in that group.
For example, we are currently doing a grow-a-plant competition. So the students have spoken at assembly about it, they’ve approached classroom teachers across the school, have made phone calls to Ms Bettio [Principal of Tarneit Rise Primary School] and written letters to the Principal as well. So it’s just, they get lots of opportunities to talk with other people and put themselves out there to show that they are a leader in this area.
[Children playing. On-screen text: Amplify]
Maggie Ryan:Amplify is the department’s name for the student voice and agency to really be pushed in our local schools, in our areas. The Global Perspectives program, I think, is a wonderful opportunity to give student voice and agency within their learning. And are taking it from, not just learning from within the classroom but into being global citizens.
The whole program started with trying to increase student voice and agency. Student voice is always about their capacity to choose which direction they want to learn, choose which global issues they’re hearing about, what they want to focus their learning on and what they’re passionate about. Everything within that whole program, we as the teachers are just facilitating their learning, and they’re able to have that voice and agency to be able to just go, ‘This is what I’m passionate about, this is what I want to learn.”
[Music plays. On-screen text: UNE University of New England. School of Education]
[On-screen text: The Education State. Victoria State Government. Department of Education]
[On-screen text: Victoria State Government. Authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne]
[End of transcript]
Updated