PROJECT TITLE: Local | Global

(Term 2 and Term 3, 2024)

School Name: Bob Hawke College

Teacher’s Name: Thomas Golovoda

Year Group: 9

Number of students: Term 2 = 13 students, Term 3 = 25 students

Creative’s Name: Poppy van Oorde-Grainger

Creative Practice(s): Visual art, filmmaking and performance

Main Curriculum Focus: Digital Technologies

Cross-curricular Links:

HASS

ENGLISH

DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY

GENERAL CAPABILITIES

Context

Bob Hawke College opened in February 2020 in Subiaco and is the first high density public secondary college in Western Australia. Thomas has been teaching Digital Technologies at Bob Hawke since 2021 and is in his fifth year of teaching. Poppy is the CEO and founder of not-for-profit production company Same Drum. She has been working in the arts for more than 20 years and has a degree in Primary Education.

“Creative Schools is very collaborative. That is a good thing. You can get inspiration from other people, and they get inspiration from you, and you get feedback from each other. You get more help, and you help others more in Creative Schools.”

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WHAT WE DID  

Project overview

Term 2 – Build websites for companies that help solve local issues.

Term 3 - Make a multilingual animated greeting for the school’s canteen.

“It’s pretty hands on. In other classes we just sit, the teacher talks and we write notes. With Creative Schools it’s more interactive and we get to explore lots of different ideas.”

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How did we make the curriculum come alive?

We started each lesson with art and drama games to help students get more confident at generating and sharing ideas.

In Term 2, After identifying local issues that students were passionate about, the students visited an organisation helping solve some of those issues. This inspired them to design their own issue-solving companies and accompanying fit-for-purpose websites.

In Term 3, students created individual animations in After Effects that were combined into a collaborative multilingual animation for their school’s canteen.

“These lessons are more relaxing and more creative than other lessons. It’s not just memorising definitions, we get to think of creative ideas.”

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How did we make the 5 Habits of Learning come alive?

The games at the start of each lesson gave the classes a fresh, communally-minded energy. For example, one game involved standing in a circle and taking turns to passing an invisible object from one person to the next with each person transforming the object into something else through mime.

“I’m learning to be more imaginative. I’m not very creative. These activities are helping me think outside of the box.”

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How did we activate student voice and learner agency?

We gave students a lot of scope to design and direct their own projects.

In Term 2, groups chose a local issue they were passionate about and then designed websites for an imaginary or real company that tackles that issue.

In Term 3, individuals selected a greeting in a language other than English that they wanted to animate for a digital display in the canteen. They each worked on one animation but collectively they chose a colour palette so that their animations would work well once they were edited together.

In both classes the students helped each other learn new and challenging software which made for a very dynamic and collaborative classroom environment.

“It is a good way to reflect on what you have done and how to improve. You get to design what you can do, and you can do something different than others. In most other subjects, you can't decide what you can do.”

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WHAT WAS THE IMPACT?

Students: improved across all five habits and particularly got better at collaborating and sharing their ideas, thoughts and feelings with each other.

Teacher: was inspired to be more creative and collaborative in the way they teach.

Creative: felt more connect with the local community through working at the school.

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“It’s very interesting we are learning to be creative which seems simple but it’s more complicated than you would think. I feel like everyone is enjoying Creative Schools, there is a lot of chatter in the room.”

“We have done lots of warm-ups and sharing ideas. We are more collaborative now. Many people in the classroom didn’t want to share ideas. That’s changed a lot because of the warmups that we do at the start. Everyone is a little more collaborative and willing to share ideas.”

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