Case Study:
Jen’s Personal Narratives CRP action research project
Teacher: Jennifer McGann
School: Ainslie School
Learning area: Primary
Year level: 3/4
Context
Ainslie School has 406 students from P-6. 31% of students identify as having a Language Background Other than English. 4% of students identify as Indigenous.
I am working part time in a year 3/4 class with 22 students.
I have been involved in a large range of professional development for improving outcomes for Indigenous Students. (Enhanced Teacher Training for Teaching Aboriginal Students through University of Wollongong). I’ve worked for around 10 years teaching, 7 years on class in Bathurst, Yass then I’ve transferred over to the ACT. I have worked as a specialised art teacher for K-2. I have explored the Forest School methodology of teaching and am passionate about making change in school that leads to further engagement and improved outcomes for students and their families. Since teaching at Ainslie school I have adopted Inquiry approach by Kath Murdoch and Country as Teacher program through the University of Canberra.
The pedagogical challenge
How can I lead students to understand the importance of their own culture and experiences in the classroom? How can I build connections with students and between students?
How can I build students’ engagement and feelings of purpose and passion through a high challenge task (narrative creation using multimodal methodology)? As opposed to focusing on behaviours of the minority or simplifying tasks for some students and leading to less challenge.
What can I achieve on a part-time basis while communicating the task with other staff?
Theoretical Basis
The Maori Model:
- Relational classrooms where power is shared
- Connectedness is important in relationships
- High expectations
Chris Sarra’s Stronger Smarter philosophy;
- positive engagement
- Demand for high expectations for all
- positive sense of their cultural identity
The Eight Alaskan Culturally Responsive Teacher Standards; in particular
- multiple worldviews
- knowing how students learn
- building on student’s cultures
Links to the five key ideas
Positive Cultural Identities- Culture as an asset for learning, experiencing a range of stories and experiences.
Strongly Connected- developing deeper connections between students and between teacher and student. Increasing parent involvement in students’ learning.
High Intellectual Challenge- developing a challenging learning environment for all. Flexible in the mode that students present their work to remain challenging for all however eliminating the barriers that some students may have in participating.
The action research question
I had multiple research questions than began with the first two:
- How can exposure to the multimodal stories of parents and carers along with other narratives increase student engagement and deepen the quality of learning/engagement/belonging?
- Can we use personal narrative, technology and high challenge to develop student’s connectedness, their sense of community and belonging?
Doing the action research
I initially planned to do a unit of work with our year 3 and 4 students. I recorded a story to share with students about my family. I made progress towards starting a unit where students worked in a small group to tell a story utilising technology including text to speech, Canva, PowerPoint or Word Processing. This project didn’t come into fruition. The project became too big and relied on permission notes from parents (to use Canva) and I had linked this to asking parents to record a story for classes to share. As the term and the teacher workload grew, this project became too difficult. I realised that sharing a story via a video recording may have more difficulties that I had originally thought of. I wanted this unit to work as I wanted to see if having a high expectations and challenge for my students would bring surprising results. This also relies on students’ technical skills, parents’ involvement and our year groups. Having such a big project was a first challenge particularly while working part time. Ultimately, after having students create and share booklets about their lifewords, I worked to incorporate the following into existing lessons and interactions with students:
- Sharing my personal stories that relate to issues that the children are having particularly around cultural awareness, stereotyping or relationships
- Expressing my value of children’s culture
- Making a class definition and understanding of culture, what it is and how we are connected.
- Making more effort to be in tune with parents, checking in about their values in their culture and their child’s learning and experiences.
The broader picture
My work connected to the following outcome:
Priority 1: students compose texts with agency and impact.
- Achievement Standard: Students describe the language features of texts including topic-specific vocabulary and literary devices, and how visual features extend meaning.
- Describe how texts across the curriculum use different language features and structures relevant to their purpose.
Conclusions
Through engagement with the project I learned the following:
- I am ready and willing to make these changes. I am very good at reflecting on what I am doing and its impact.
- I can build relationships further by delving deeper into children’s identity and their values.
- We have had more open and interesting conversations since I have begun this course. I knew it was all important but I had no means to justify what I was doing.
- I’m very interested in the areas where we may feel uncomfortable …then digging in to what is happening and why.
- It’s ok to not focus on quantitative means to collect evidence.
- I was leaning toward making graphs and comparing percentages however the conversations I’ve had and the reflection on different experiences have led to much further insight and recognition of the success in small changes.
- Many mistakes will be made
- I enjoy working in this way but it has helped to have a group of wonderful people to share ideas with and compare notes.
Time to consider: If I feel uncomfortable about a cultural situation, lean into it. Think about why and explain this in the moment. Or come back to it and chat further with parents and other staff.
Pride and connection: Discussing how children are progressing in their home language to gain insight into their literacy skills. Asking about the child’s feelings also.
Celebrating languages- I’d like to start the year making signs and posters with students to welcome them in their language.
I’d like to do more with giving students agency to present in English and/or their home language.
Continue on my journey: Seek support from colleagues, continue to question my assumptions and give students the opportunity to share their understandings.
Seek support from colleagues, continue to question my assumptions and give students the opportunity to share their understandings.
Colleagues’ work: I’ve gained many ideas from my colleagues as to other ideas to implement.