Season poles at Alkimos Beach Public School.
Age Group: 0-7, 7-14
Grant Name: 2020 Lendlease Junior Landcare Grants
School: Alkimos Beach Public School
Grant Sponsor: Lendlease
Project Overview:
Alkimos Beach Public School located on Perth’s North West coastal corridor in WA, received a Lendlease Junior Landcare Grant in 2020 to implement a double project.
Totem Poles-representing Aboriginal Dreamtime Stories:
The school is located on the traditional lands of the Whadjuk people and wanted to ensure that students had a better understanding and appreciation about the local Indigenous culture. So, one part of their project was for Year 6 students to design seasonal ‘totem’ poles to represent Aboriginal Dreamtime stories specific to the local area and to feature these as an extension of an Aboriginal Yarning Circle which also incorporates an Indigenous garden. Local Aboriginal elders and artists provided support and assistance with the designs and painting of season for the poles.
The inclusion of totem poles to the Yarning Circle area helped students develop an understanding of how important the natural environment is to Aboriginal people and how Dreamtime stories explain this.
Emily, a Year 6 student said, “I loved learning about why we were painting the poles a certain way.”
Waste Management Education
The second aspect of the project was to help children in Kindergarten and Pre-Primary develop strong recycling habits from an early age and to understand the impact using sustainable products can have on their daily lives.
Younger students learned the correct skills to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle by providing waste management resources for them to use on a daily basis at school, instilling skills they can take home to their families. They’ve learned about the importance of reducing land fill and how to recycle.
Educational Outcomes
Sustainability education is futures-oriented, focusing on protecting environments and creating a more ecologically and socially just world through informed action. Actions to improve sustainability are both individual and collective endeavours shared across local and global communities.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples’ unique sense of Identity has been developed as a structural tool for the embedding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures within the Australian curriculum. This sense of Identity is approached through the interconnected aspects of Country/Place, People and Culture.