Background
St Patrick's College in Wellington is a decile 8 secondary boys school with a roll of around 660.
HOD Technology Chris Smyth graduated in 1995 with a BDes Design in Visual Communications Design from Wellington Polytechnic/Victoria University and spent almost seven years as a freelance technical illustrator, illustrator, designer, painter and model-maker. After completing his Graduate Diploma in Teacher-Secondary at Wellington College of Education in 2002, Chris joined the staff at St Pat's. Initially his energies were divided between the Visual Art department, and the Technology and Graphics department. In 2004 Chris was appointed assistant HOD Technology and Graphics. In 2006 he became a Beacon Practice teacher. At the end of that year he was appointed Acting HOD Technology for 2007, a position that was made permanent in late 2007.
Beginning in 2005, St Pat's had introduced what was termed 'cross-curricula projects'. These involved Year 9 and Year 10 students completing short two-week projects involving three departments. However, these were less successful than they might have been due to the difficulties with structuring and managing projects of this nature in a five- or six-period day. The practicalities of swapping classes had not been fully understood and many teachers came to resent the project as an inconvenient imposition.
During Chris's teacher training he completed a project drawing together visual art and technology within a film-making context. Positive feedback convinced him of the possibilities of taking a cross-curricula approach to teaching. Chris began his teaching career at St Pat's in both the Art and Technology departments, though, as a new teacher, he did not have the opportunity to develop units of work across both subject areas. In 2004 in the Technology and Graphics department he was able to do more and was supported in this interest by the then HOD of Technology, Brian Allen.
Chris had little involvement in the 'official' cross-curricula projects in the first year they were undertaken. With the additional planning and development time available through his involvement in the Beacon Project, he made it his goal to develop and trial a unit of work that explored a potentially effective way of working across subjects, that fits comfortably with the multi-disciplinary nature of Technology in the real world. Initial work on this was done in late 2005 when applying for inclusion in the Beacon project. This was slightly before the first of the school's 'official' cross-curricula projects was introduced.
