Outcomes
Students gained a lot from working through the project as a whole with its broad range of trialling and testing.
According to Wendy, "they know how to manage a project and that's so important in their work. I see that these kids have this way of working through their project which gets them good grades and doing meaningful things; they come in and get going."
The students learned a lot during the peer teaching section, with some doing better than others and some requiring more help, such as the student who had an injury and so found the practical aspect hard to complete.
Wendy is enthusiastic about how well the peer teaching went. She plans to do it again with this unit, possibly structured more tightly next time with more teaching around what her expectations are for the end.
Student reflections:
"There's freedom to do your own thing in Technology – the Technology room has a different atmosphere to other classrooms. We get a lot of help from teachers but most of the stuff we can do for ourselves and students help each other."
"It's harder than other subjects because of the type and amount of work expected of you – you need to be more organised than in other subjects."
"The results make it more worthwhile."
"In Year 12 there's more detail justifying what you're doing and why you're doing it – it's getting more real."
Although given all the different possibilities for making fabric only, a few students actually worked with the possum fur when making their own material. However, Wendy says they were obviously very interested in the possum section of the unit, as all the workbooks put in a lot of detail about the possum fur visits and Sue's talk, in which had also looked at females working in the hunting/trapping environment.
Wendy found that environmental, social and ethical issues naturally arose as the unit progressed. She feels that these were more "authentic" for having arisen during an activity rather than being introduced by the teacher, such as when the students were reading about activists protesting (about the use of fur) during Fashion Week rather than the teacher introducing them as a topic. During Sue's talk on how Basically Bush operates the animal humanity issue was raised and the company's policy (ensuring possums aren't left all day in traps and any joeys are killed before plucking the fur) discussed.
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