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Published: Tuesday, 30 April 2024

Teaching for the students that are in front of usBold Abstract Circles in Soft Purple Mint Green and Turquoise


Laura Newman – Executive Officer, Social Education Victoria

SEV recently held our first teachmeet for the year, which attracted three passionate and skilled teachers from very different contexts – we had a wide-ranging conversation around how VCE Sociology was going this year and all three reported a similar teaching challenge.

‘My students are coming in to AOS 3.1 with really patchy background knowledge and this
makes it difficult for me to teach Australian First Nations cultures with nuance and rigour.’ 

There was some other key information identified – students might access their ‘news’ information through platforms like TikTok rather than accessing more reliable news media so the information they had access to might be dramatically different to the student sitting next to them. Additionally, students who had recently migrated to Australia simply hadn’t had the chance to learn History or Civics and Citizenship in Australia – students at other schools had accessed inconsistent learning about First Nations histories, cultures and perspectives. For whatever reasons, this was the experience of many students coming into Unit 3 AOS1.

Strategies teachers were trying:

Centering representation analysis

  • scaffolding background knowledge and critical reading skills
  • modelling short representation analysis writing
  • using this method to engage with multiple perspectives and diverse issues
  • engaging in lots of ‘low stakes’ and more formal writing practice.

Centering sample response study

  • reading, annotating, discussing and improving sample responses (short answer and extended response styles
  • providing samples at a number of levels so students can understand how many writers are organising the information
  • asking students to improve mid-level responses or collaboratively mark these.

Scaffolding inquiry

  • students were struggling to engage independently with new sources, so teacher support and modelling was required – this meant more class shared texts and representations rather than students choosing their own – maybe more of that later in the year.
  • teachers all had to make tough decisions about streamlining content in this area of study to make it manageable for students – so choose wisely and chunk it out!

Building background knowledge

Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week

A common thread was students’ apprehension at engaging with written texts: There are so many strategies for reading comprehension and content-area literacy but here is a nice resource to get started on that journey. I’ve used Article of the Week as a tool to build background knowledge and critical engagement for year 12 subjects in the past (and even better if you get the chance to start in Year 11 or earlier) and while it takes regular time the payoff is huge.

Critical media literacy

A common thread that came through was that students’ were avid media users but not necessarily literate or critical of that media. Here are some resources and activities for building critical media literacies

What about Civics and Citizenship?

Teachers identified that low-level knowledge about society and politics, as well as challenges with inquiry around social issues were factors for students – if there was ever a really strong case to be advocating for improvements to your school’s F-10 Victorian Curriculum courses for History, and for Civics and Citizenship, this is it.

Learning safely

As always with this unit – the lived experiences of First Nations people and other people of colour need to be thought about and taken into consideration – If you look at two resources for your own nourishment, I’d recommend this exercise for thinking about implicit bias as well as Culture is Life’s preparatory resource for teaching First Nations perspectives.

Before embarking on U3 AoS2, maybe you could also check out these sources to help us teach responsively.

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