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

I thought it was interesting that the government
aren’t helping the problem. If you give money
to the government, they don’t really give it to
them. They give half. They think, ‘Oh they’re a bit
greedy, we’ll just take that, and we’ll give them
a bit of it’. That’s what they’re doing. I reckon we
should sponsor a child, like I do…This child now
has a bed to sleep on, a blanket, a pillow, and now
has a home to live in. He’s almost got enough
money to move to a different country that has
better protection from getting killed. And I
think that if we’re going to fix poverty, we’ve
got to do it all together. Everyone, one person
can make a difference, but everyone can make
a big difference.
And our class…has been doing this thing, faces of
poverty, art with Mr Ross. We do, we’re bringing
in cardboard boxes and we’re putting people in
poverty on the front and back and sides on them.
And we’re making a collage and putting it in and
try and raise some money so parents can come
and see what we’re trying to be learning here.
We’ve also done PowerPoint presentations, and
we’re making a thing for GarageBand, and we’re
putting our music and sad music, and then we’re
going to do a PowerPoint presentation and put
our voice in…children have rights.
Story 13: Student story
Okay, well I think when we started [the project],
before we had the values, we had, we just had
rules, like don’t litter, don’t leave stuff lying
around in the sandbox and things like that. And
people sort of ignored them, because it didn’t
really seem important then. But now that we
have the values, like we have respect, and under
that we have that it’s disrespectful to leave your
things around for other people, people can kind
of connect the rules to a value and see that it’s
important. And so I think people are more likely
to obey the rules now than they were before,
because they can see how it’s important to
other people.
leave,’ and then another one was like, ‘Won’t
it just get returned automatically in a hundred
minutes’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, but other people
need to use this space during that time, so if you
could take it away that would be good’. So, then
he took it away and that was a good example.
Well [I chose that story because] I think respect
is probably one of the biggest values out of the
group of values that we selected. And that shows
that, each story shows, how it was put into place
and how that wouldn’t have happened before we
had the values. So it shows that they’re making
a difference.
Yeah well…we have these sandboxes where you
can build whatever you want. But the rule is that
when you’re done you have to take it away so
that someone else can build there. And we had a
few people in there building, and then the boys
they always like to bring everything out and put
it everywhere, like motorcycles and everything.
And then there was three boys there, and one
said, ‘Oh you have to take your stuff before you
34 Giving Voice to the Impacts of Values Education: The Final Report of the Values in Action Schools Project