LEARNER AGENCY
Hello, my name is Holly Haswell-Smith and I have an exciting new role in the school this year: Learner Agency Coordinator. This coordinator position will play a leading role in enriching the co-curricular and extra-curricular aspects of the student experience at Yeronga State High School. I will lead the development and coordination of student organisations, clubs and groups as well as capturing and promoting opportunities for student learner agency outside of formal classroom learning environment.
The most important part of this role is student voice and facilitating student agency and advocacy. We will do this in a number of ways and via a number of avenues. The first Student Congress we had was on bringing global competency into the classroom. The first Student Summit reviewed the Care Class program.
If you have any ideas, thoughts, or questions please email me: learneragency@yerongashs.eq.edu.au
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Student recommendations from recent Summit and Congress (with a picture from the summit/congress):
- Use assembly to address current affair issues from around the world: 'World Wide News'
- Use assembly to address a broad range of student interests – cultural spotlight, critical thinking etc: 'Catch up on Culture'
- Across a week or a day use curriculum and lunch time for student to have positive cultural experiences – food, music, dance etc: 'Yeronga World Tour' could be part of Multicultural day/week
What action is being taken:
- World Wide News and Catch up on Culture at assemblies
- For World Wide News the Amnesty group are presenting on the issue of Women's rights and the current movement in Iran. This will coincide with International Women's Day.
- Planning for Multicultural Day will happen soon and the Yeronga World Tour will be a part of that, updates coming soon.
Student Summit
Students met and collaborated at the Student Summit on Care Class. Students were asked to reflect on the care class program and to offer recommendations on improving our care program. These are their three recommendations:
- Care Class Collabs – care class teachers create extra-curricular and co-curricular classes that interest them. Students then choose the activity they want to do. This means the care classes would be mixed groups of varying sizes and possibly across year levels.
- The plan – give care class teachers time to plan.
- The restructure – house points for turning up on time to care class and the roll to be marked as a pass out of care class. The main idea being that the roll is marked last instead of first and there is a reward for showing up on time.
What action is being taken:
- The leadership team is reviewing care class and will consider the recommendation around 'Care Class Collabs' and 'The Plan'.
- Ms Haswell-Smith will work with a couple of teachers to try out 'The restructure' to see if it has a positive impact on the use of time in care class then feedback to staff and students.
YCONNECT
The Y Connect Project was a partnership between Yeronga State High School and researchers from Griffith University. The Y Connect Project brought students, teachers, school leaders, artists, arts organisations, and researchers together in an attempt to enhance young people's sense of belonging and connectedness, and to generate improvements in several aspects of learning. To address these goals, arts-based pedagogies were employed across the curriculum, teachers partnered with artists and arts organisations, and focused arts projects became part of the natural landscape of the school.
The image above provides a representation of the Project's key findings in relation to research question one – impact on students. It reveals that six critical connections were enhanced for the young people who participated in the Y Connect Project: connection to self; connection to each other; connection to learning; connection to and belonging within the school community (abbreviated to connection to the school community); connection to the Arts, artists and arts organisations (abbreviated at times to connection to the Arts); and connection to the future through the creation of alternate possible selves (abbreviated to connection to possible selves).
Y Connect way is capable of adding real value for learners and learning by employing the expertise of artists in partnership with teachers and the curriculum and making use of the power of arts-based pedagogies.