HUMANITIES

Year 8 Civics Program

The 2018 year 8 students participated in a Civics program on Monday, 10 Tuesday, 11 and Wednesday. 12 December. They role-played being members of different nations associated with the UN and attempted to build model embassies to represent their nation. Depending on the general wealth and resources of a nation, the students were given an assortment of materials to build with. They presented their final models to the whole year level at the end of the program.

The students did a wonderful job engaging with the project, participating in debates and negotiating for resources with other students. The teachers involved were happy to see so many students putting their best effort into each task they were assigned. We were particularly impressed with the way the students in Russia were able to bounce back after they were disadvantaged by a student “defecting” to the USA, with the effort that the Cuban group put into their debate to research their nation and apply teacher corrections to their debate, to the very interesting role-playing that the students from Saudi Arabia engaged in.

We hope that, rather than winning, the students were able to better understand the distribution of wealth and resources across the globe, and how some nations might be disadvantaged.

Lastly, the students voted for their winner, using preferential voting which was also a good learning experience. Whilst it appeared that Saudi Arabia and Cuba were the most popular in terms of student voice, the tailed votes revealed that the USA had collected the majority, so well done to the students from 8B!

Congratulations to all students and thank you to the staff that assisted in the program’s success.

Kristin Skennar

Humanities Coordinator 

& 

Asli Dulgar

Legal Teacher

First Nations Q&A

On Monday, 17 December, our year 7 and 8 students engaged in a special program, expanding on their understanding of Indigenous issues in Australia. The students prepared questions for the panel around issues associated with Australia Day, the environment and cultural awareness. On the panel was Jedda Costa, a Ricci Marks Award recipient in her final year of a journalism degree at RMIT, Mikayla George, an elite aerial skier with dreams of representing Australia at the Winter Olympics in 2022, and Jamil Tye, the director of Indigenous Student Services at Monash University. During the program, the students were extremely engaged and took so much away from the discussion. We would like to thank our panel for giving up their time to come to DSC and engage with students and teachers in such a genuine and positive way. Thank you to our KESO Officer, Alice Young, and also to our teaching staff Belinda McGee, Daniel Tomada and Cass Blake who put in a lot of time and effort into the organisation of the event.

Kristin Skennar

Humanities Coordinator