Worth a look: Humanities and English resources for AC

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Email contact:
malcolm.mcinerney@thebartonsc.sa.edu.au

 

Resources supporting the Australian Curriculum for English, History and Geography

Over recent weeks we have seen the publication of on-line resources to support the Australian Curriculum for English, History and Geography (also Mathematics). These resources have been developed by the national teaching associations for the subjects (HTAA,  AATE and AGTA) with money supplied from the Australian Government via Educational Services Australia (ESA). The SACOL (Supporting Australian Curriculum Online) resources are worth a look because they contain professional learning materials on our learning areas as well as specific teaching materials for the new F-10 Australian Curriculum in these subjects. As well as providing some useful professional learning in humanities, the resources may also provide some teaching ideas and activities which can be adapted to our Stage 1 subjects.

As time goes by, the sites are likely to include materials to support the Year 11 and 12 courses as they are published by ACARA. These sites are worth a look to see what is going on with the Australian Curriculum, which is already impacting on F-10 schools and indirectly will impact on us next year by the fact that some of our students will have undertaken the Australian Curriculum subjects instead of SACE in their Year 10 classes this year.

If you have not already done so, go to the ACARA Curriculum Portal to view the English, Geography and History curricula prior to looking at the resource sites to get some background on these three new curriculum's in our faculty area.

Here are the SACOL sites relevant to English and Humanities at Thebarton Senior College for your preview:

The English site

The History site

The Geography site

... and the Mathematics site for those interested

The Science site (ASTA) should be published by the end of June. As for the business and economics and civics and citizenship sites, no decisions have been made as yet (waiting for the money from the Federal Government). Hopefully these learning areas will have the chance to develop resources to support the Australian Curriculum in those subjects when they are published by ACARA.

Geocareers

Image above: The AGTA GeoCareers website

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Think about nominating a profile for the GeoCareers site

The Australian Geography Teachers Association (AGTA) GeoCareers website was established back in 2007 to promote to schools and students the idea that many people we see working in our world, may not be known as geographers but in fact trained as and are geographers (they just don’t use the name). As schools do their career and subject counselling it is often said that students need to think about subjects that lead to a vocation. As previous Spatialworlds postings have made clear, there are a plethora of jobs for the geographically trained (albeit not called geography).

The Geocareers site hopes that profiling geographers doing a wide range of jobs will encourage students to consider choosing geography as the vibrant, relevant and vocationally pertinent subject that it is. The site profiles geographers working indoor, outdoors and in the areas of environmental care, knowledge sharing and research.  Those profiled are asked questions such as: prior studies, work description, best aspects of job, career pathway /opportunities and advice to people considering  the career.

As well as providing interesting profiles of individuals, the site provides information on geography courses around Australia and a range of resources related to careers in geography.

In the future AGTA hopes to make the site more dynamic through videos and interactive contact with those profiled (if the profiled are happy to do so).

Through this posting I encourage readers to forward themselves or individuals they know who would be candidates to be profiled on GeoCareers. The GeoCareers site manager, Rob Berry would then make contact asking the nominated person to complete a GeoCareers questionnaire and provide a picture of themselves at work. The more profiles AGTA can muster on the site, the more effective the site can become to encourage young people to consider studying geography and working in a field related to geography and/or working in a job where they consider their geographical skills will enhance their capacity to perform their job. Please consider this call and let’s see if we can build the best geography careers site on the web. By the way, considering that many of Spatialworlds visitors are from all around the world, AGTA is happy to profile individuals from anywhere in the world. Just send the email contact details to me at manning@chariot.net.au and AGTA will do the rest.

 Another Australian careers in geography site

Another site to support the GeoCareers site is that from the Geographical Society of NSW (GSNSW). The Geographical Society of NSW (GSNSW) has recently produced four videos of Honours Students from 2012 in a series called "Why Study Geography?"   I believe that it has relevance to geography in all Australian states and territories. The videos are of students from the University of Sydney, Wollongong, UNSW and Newcastle explaining why they became interested in geography, what they love about it, what they have been studying and how they see geography as being a useful subject for their lives and careers.  The videos are of young people communicating in a manner that is likely to be received well by other young people, such as prospective students.