Resource+2

**Resource 2:** Website NFSA. (2010). //Australian Screen:// //Multicultural Australia//. Retrieved September 29, 2010, from http://aso.gov.au/education/culture/multicultural-australia/

__**Description/Explanation of Resource:**__ The website Australian Screen – Multicultural Australia, is a collection of audiovisual files that document Australia’s heritage focusing on the varying perceptions of different cultural groups residing in Australia over the years. The website contains snippets of videos from news reports, documentaries as well as films that span that across 100 years of Australian settlement. These videos present both Anglo-Saxon and non-Anglo Saxon perspectives of how racism in Australia developed and affected their community and identity, documenting how these perceptions have changed from 1890s to 2005.

Created by the Learning Federation and curriculum support, each audiovisual file has curator and education notes, highlighting important teaching points such as filming techniques and additional background information that is helpful for teachers and students alike.

__**Relevance to Outcome:**__ The focus outcome for this unit comes from HSIE under the Cultures strand where students are asked to “explain how shared customs, practices, symbols, languages and traditions in communities contribute to Australian and community identities”. This website provides a number of secondary sources in the form of videos, each conveying a different perception of various cultural groups in Australia. By exposing students' to multiple perspectives, this website builds their knowledge of how Australians have come together over the years to combat their differences, sharing customs, practices, symbols, languages and traditions to give Australia the multicultural identity it has today. Furthermore, by asking students to analyze the language and filming techniques that the videos employ to convey a particular message, this will help students gain a deeper understanding of the historical relationship between Anglo Saxons and those of non-Anglo Saxon backgrounds in Australia. Integrating HSIE outcomes with English outcomes in this way enables teachers and students to identify and utilize the connections between syllabuses, enhancing and maximizing learning, while ensuring that learning is meaningful and applicable (NSW BOS, 1996, p. 2). As the videos span across 100 years of multicultural Australia, students will be challenged to explain why different perceptions have changed over the years and how this has affected the Australian community and identity we have today.

__**Aspect of Literacy to be Explored:**__ A key component in helping students develop their literacy skills is helping students develop their spelling skills. While this resource could be used to explore a variety of literacy demands including the teaching of filming techniques, this unit will use the videos to develop students’ vocabulary and spelling skills. According to recent studies, spelling ability develops through a series of stages, each stage reflecting the children’s current knowledge about speech sounds (phonemes), the relationships of these sounds to letters and letter-strings (graphophnoic knowledge) and the units of meaning within words (morphemes) (Westwood, 1999, p. 7). These stages also reflect how well children have acquired specific strategies for visualising, writing and checking words (Westwood, 1999, p. 7).

This resource will be used in our second lesson of the integrated unit focusing on cultural identities. The lesson will require students to utilise their current spelling strategies by identifying new vocabulary that is encountered in the videos, integrating their phonemic and visual knowledge of spelling to spell unfamiliar words. Developmentally students in Stage 2 are typically in their transitional stage where they have acquired a more sophisticated understanding of word structure, relying on more visual strategies than phonetic strategies alone to check the accuracy of what they have written (Westwood, 1999, p.9). This lesson will encourage students to continue practising and building their word bank by attempting to spell the unfamiliar word first using their spelling strategies, before using spell check on Microsoft Word. In this way, students will develop a pool of known letter sequences from which to draw on in future spelling. This exercise will encourage students to use a range of resources and modalities such as mouth, ear, eye, hand and brain when developing spelling proficiency.


 * __References__:**

NSW Board of Studies (1996). //Curriculum Integration: Guiding statement. [Online]//. Retrieved July 17, 2008, from: []

Westwood, P. (1999). //How do children acquire spelling skills in Spelling: Approaches to teaching and assessment.// Camberwell: ACER. pp 7-17.