Maui's Dolphins Co-Construction Day 1

Year 9s and 10s have started co-constructing their Maui's Dolphins unit that will probably take them the term to complete. The overarching question for the unit is:

"What Are the Issues Facing the Maui Dolphins?"

I know - a pretty weird topic for an English class. However, when I was young, idealistic, and at teacher's college, I studied Education Outside The Classroom with a specific focus on how to make English engaging for my students. Even all the way back then I thought that students needed to see how things worked 'in real life'. At school I always wanted solid, real-life based learning, and I've always loved projects. Always. It was the thing I really missed as a student when I entered High School - not having the option to be creative, to carry out research and do projects anymore. So when the school's Sustainability Action Group approached me to ask my juniors if they could write letters lobbying to protect the Maui's Dolphins, my response was "why not?" - all the hard work of finding a suitable project was done. Thanks to the Hackyrclass project last term, I've learned enough skills to carry out a co-constructed, UDL, PBL unit. I've experimented on two small-scale projects. Now it's time to challenge myself again and draw on those skills and allow the kids to more-or-less run the whole term.

Year 9Period 5Tuesday, Term 3, Week 1.

This class has had experience with co-construction, so we launched straight into it. The skills they have to do (for marks that are going on reports) are:

• Formal Writing
• Creative Writing

They will be doing a letter to the Prime Minister lobbying for the protection of the Maui's Dolphins for their formal writing, as requested by SAG.

They also need to learn how to do literature response essays in preparation for their exams next term.

Processes and Strategies

The students are desperate to skype with experts about the Maui's Dolphins. They are also desperate to go on a field trip and talk to the people on the ground.

Purposes and Audiences

They have identified a wide-ranging pool of sources that they can draw on to search for information about the Maui's Dophins.

Ideas

We will be looking the issues Maui Dolphins are facing and how they are similar to and different from the ones in Dolphin's Tale. Ideas that they have found so far are to do with pollution, fishing, mining, drilling, habitat, and disease. Because of the focus of the government and the purpose of the letter, I will also be talking to them about the economics that affect the situation.

Language Features

The students have no knowledge about language features and so we will need to focus on how the messages of the film are communicated through film techniques.

Structure

The students have a basic working knowledge of how films are structured (the good guy always wins unless it's a horror, in which case everyone dies).

Year 10Period 6Tuesday, Term 3, Week 1

This is my second day with them. Yesterday I told them what co-construction means, we talked about what we have to do and options of things that we could do. There's quite a buzz as the students are talking about the different ways they can present the learning, and the different things that they might look at. As it turns out, Maui Dolphins are a feature in year 10 science as well, so many of them already have a good understanding of what's going on. The challenge is to extend that knowledge and use it to do practical things with.

The Have-To-Do tasks are:

• Formal Writing
• Creative Writing
• Oral Presentations

As with the year 9s, they will be writing letters to John Key lobbying for the protection of Maui's dolphins for their formal writing.

Processes and Strategies

Again, these students are dead keen on getting out of the classroom and seeing how the issues are being tackled at the ground level. They are also really excited about the concept of skyping experts.

Purposes and Audiences

The ranges of purposes and audiences that they considered is vast. When they are looking for information to find out what the issues are for Maui Dolphins, they have considered a wide range of texts from podcasts for the general public to websites for students to propaganda aimed at business.

Ideas

Using the brainstorm from yesterday, they have identified issues of mining, oil drilling, habitat, fishing, pollution, and diseases. We have talked about how these ideas will develop and unfold as we go through the unit.

Language Features

Film is the major text for this unit, and so the focus will be on film techniques, and how those techniques communicate the messages.

Structure

We will look at the different ways letters are structured, particularly for persuasive, lobbying type letters. We will also look at how the film is structured.

Because this is this class' first co-construction, we have stopped today with the Making Meaning strand. The students then took a vote as to which way around they wanted to cover the material. The options were to study the film first or to research the dolphins first. First vote was a dead heat - 15 voted to start research first. I then gave them 5 minutes to debate between themselves for a re-vote. Re-vote gave a slim majority to starting with the research first.