Giving Voice to the Impacts of Values Education The Final Report of ...

Southern Highlands Schools of NSW
New South Wales
Learning and Acting for Poverty
Participating schools
• Bowral Public School
• Bowral High School
• Colo Vale Public School
• Hill Top Public School
• Mittagong Public School
• Glenquarry Public School
• Kangaloon Public School
Cluster Coordinator: Ms Jennifer Quist, Colo Vale Public School (August 2009 to November 2009)
and Ms Dianne Hennessy, Bowral Public School (December 2008 to July 2009)
Deputy Coordinator: Mr Graham Perry, Mittagong Public School
University Advisor: Professor Susan Groundwater-Smith, University of Sydney
The project
The Learning and Acting for Poverty project
brought together one government high school
and six government primary schools in the
Bowral and Mittagong district of southern New
South Wales. In their project submission, the
schools in the cluster identified ‘parochialism’
as an issue. In order to highlight the values of
empathy and compassion, among other values,
the schools targeted students in Years 5 to 8 and
set out to undertake an investigation into poverty
and its causes and consequences. By seeking to
understand these values more deeply, the project
hoped to develop student awareness and positive
behaviours for a socially inclusive community,
and to develop an ethos of service and learning
through service to others.
To launch the project, the secondary school
invited students from the six primary schools to
participate in a Big Day In. Students participated
in a dialogue with young people who had worked
in overseas settings characterised by economic
poverty alongside community resilience. The
first-person accounts and visual material showing
aspects of poverty created a powerful experience
for many of the Big Day In participants.
Teachers worked with colleagues across the
cluster and shared teaching strategies. Each
school then identified a project and undertook
an investigation into an aspect of poverty, its
causes and its consequences in the contemporary
world, and worked toward developing a solution
to that problem. The issues they chose ranged
from an examination of the rights of the child
to meeting the nutritional needs of diverse
communities. Central to all the project work was
the notion that students have agency and can
make a positive contribution to addressing issues
relating to poverty in places beyond their own
immediate worlds. Through the Moodle online
learning tool, students shared their learning with
others in the cluster. Teachers embarked upon a
shared professional learning journey to develop
knowledge, expertise and pedagogical skills
relevant to the project.
The project delivered significant outcomes
for the participating school communities.
One teacher expressed the change in students
in the following manner:
Section 3: Accounts of the VASP cluster projects
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