My Visit to Bicheno Primary School

Bicheno Primary School campus consists of four classrooms with combination classes of Prep-6 (approx. 90 students total), one Kinder classroom of 11 children, and a birth-4 childcare center. All of the grade 7-12 students are bussed to St. Mary’s school approximately an hour north.

The classrooms look directly out on to Waub’s Bay and I’m told that during migration season, the students can watch the whales from their classrooms. The principal, Lisa, is new this year and has been on the job only one month. (School started first of February.) Lisa has taught the last 15 years in St. Helens, up the coast about an hour. Although some of them do, principals are not required to have any special certification or degree, and so she came directly from being a teacher to her role as principal in Bicheno.

The school campus is center to the left.

Our tour of the school began with a visit to the Kinder room, ages 4-5. Lisa told me they use Kathy Walker's approach of play-based learning. The learning goals were posted as we walked in the room and we saw kids playing at different stations in the room. We walked over to the doctor’s surgery (the term doctor surgery here is the same as we would use the term doctor’s office or clinic). There the teacher Eliza (the senior teacher in the school at 7 years tenure) was being assisted by the “nurse” because she had a pretend broken arm and wrist, which were bandaged loosely in gauze. Lisa had an actual injury/bandaged knee and so she was asked if she would like to be seen by the doctor, to which she replied, “of course!” The receptionist gave Lisa a blank piece of paper and asked her to, “please fill out these forms” and then she was given a magazine to read while she waited. Meanwhile, the nurse tended to a baby in a crib (a Kinder boy) and used the stethoscope to listen to his chest. There appeared to be no “doctor in the house.” Eliza took this opportunity to step away and talk with me about her work with the state music curriculum and the concept of soundscaping. She said this curriculum used classical music that was composed to emulate animals, such as Flight of the Bumblebee and Peter and the Wolf. She is hoping to use the local penguins and whales to inspire music learning in similar ways. This is a terrific example of place-conscious learning that I have been reading and writing about.

As we left the Kinder room, Lisa told me about the close collaboration they have with the child care center located on their campus and she pointed out the school garden that appeared to be featuring silver beet (kale) and some types of squash. We stopped in the other four classrooms, just walking through to see the setups but not disturb the lessons. In each of the rooms students sat in groups of four with shared tables. One girl looked at me intently, remembering me from our glass bottom boat tour where she assisted her dad, the skipper. When I asked what type of fish we were looking at during the tour, she told me it was a mullet fish. (In case you were wondering, the fish were neither business in the front, nor party in the back.)

It was nearly recess time so we made our way to the lounge where the five teachers filtered through, stopping for a “cuppa” as they say. I asked one of the teachers if she stopped everything and watched when the whales came by. She told me she had only been teaching there one year and hadn’t seen the whales, and that she commutes with Lisa from St. Helens. I asked her if she did any other type of place conscious teaching and she replied, “I can’t think of anything. As I said, I don’t live here and so I don’t really have a connection to any of those kinds of things.” This comment reminded me of the many smaller towns in the Chico area where the majority of the teachers commute from Chico. It has significant implications for how teachers conduct place-conscious learning in a place where they are potentially outsiders.

Andy and I had learned about the local Aboriginal woman named Wauba Debar, after whom Waub’s Bay was named. She is famous for having jumped in the water to save white sailors from drowning (one of them her husband). Her grave is near the school along the coast and I had read somewhere that the local school children tended her gravesite. During the recess break, I asked Eliza if she knew anything about that and she told me that she thought some teacher who used to be there a few years ago was interested in Wauba and did some activities around that history. This information also has implications for how institutionalized the value of place-conscious learning is, or is not.

Upon hearing my question, another teacher told me she was working on a special certificate about kinship systems through Charles Sturt University (in addition to her certificate in deaf education). She told me she became interested in this because she herself is indigenous and was from the northwest part of Tasmania. But, she said she can’t really talk to indigenous folks in the Bicheno area about it because they were of a different "mob" than hers (and from my little research, I think historically hostile tribes to each other). So she said she can really only go back and talk to the elders of her mob up north. Instead of getting into all that, she decided to focus on learning just about the concept of kinship systems. Before I could ask her how she might tie this into her classroom learning, the music came on the loudspeaker, indicating it was time for kids and teachers to return to their classrooms. (The history of Tasmanian indigenous people is perhaps the ugliest of all in Australia.)

Front of the school

Lisa and I talked a while longer, mostly about curriculum, standards, and the all-important “data.” I asked, “how do you teach religion here?” and her short answer was, “we don’t,” but our conversation got interrupted by a phone call and I took my leave. On the way through the office I noticed a stand with about 40 different tri-fold glossy pamphlets. They were on topics such as: Diversity in Tasmanian Government Schools, Students with English as an Additional Language, Mobile Devices, Religious Education, Support for Aboriginal Students, etc. I asked the office receptionist if I might take some and she said, “Sure. Last year the Tasmanian government required us to have these.” I guess all of this information is available online, but I probably wouldn’t have discovered them that way. My analysis of the information in some of them was really interesting to me.

I enjoyed my few hours at Bicheno Primary, learning about some of the ways this little “country” school is unique. But I was also struck, as I sat in the teacher’s lounge during recess, how much this particular experience felt just like almost every other teacher’s lounge I’ve ever been in.

Land of Plenty

Hiking up to Wine Glass Bay lookout

View of Wine Glass Bay from the lookout, before we hiked down to it (!)

"The Hazards"

View of the "Gulch" from lookout in Bicheno

"Painted Cliffs" on Maria Island

More cliff face on Maria Island

Sea Cave on Isle de Phoques (Seal Island)

Cool stone along the foreshore in Bicheno

How did nature do that??

Steady as a rock

Tasmanian Wildlife

Wallaby

Albatross

Seals - a fraction of how many we saw

Cape Barren Goose

Wombat

Crab

Penguins Crossing

Our first shot of the penguins - can you see it??

Only shot of the penguins to turn out

Snake!

I guess this is how you get around the "no dogs on the beach" law

   

Wild Tourists at Wine Glass Bay

Tasmania: Part I

Our flight on Wednesday was just over an hour from Melbourne (the mainland) but it feels like a world away. We landed in Launceston, just one gate and two luggage carousels. Launceston is at the north end of the Tasmania; Hobart, the state capitol and population 200,000, is at the southern end.

Our Avis car took us down the center of the state and over to the east coast. We rented a house in Bicheno (Bi-shen’-oh) – population 750 – for the week, thinking we would drive to different parts of Tasmania from that base. We got to Bicheno just in time for dinner and a walk down to the “blowhole” at sunset.

Thursday was the only day forecasted for rain, so we decided to head down to Hobart and see the much talked about MONA (Museum of Old and New Art). The drive was highly reminiscent of New Zealand, both in its scenery and its harrowing narrowness. We saw lots of road kill – possum, wallabies, wombats.

We parked down at the wharf and walked around the shops, along with a couple thousand people from the docked Carnival cruise ship. There we learned that the MONA was actually a bit up the road by car. (It also has its own ferry from the wharf.)

The only thing I knew about MONA before getting there was that it was new – it opened in 2011. I just assumed it was something like the MOMA. It turns out that it’s a huge private collection owned by David Walsh, a millionaire professional gambler who self identifies as having Asperger’s. MONA has been described as an adult Disneyland in a cave (it’s three stories deep and it feels like it). I could count the number of “old” pieces of art on one hand – it’s pretty much just MNA. There was no printed information anywhere in the galleries so you had to use an electronic device and headphones to get more information. The plus side is you get more than an artist name and medium and they send you your personalized tour to your email; the downside is I spent more time navigating the technology and felt distracted from the art. Mind you, sometimes that was probably a good thing. Andy describes the experience as “consciousness altering but not always pleasant.” It was pretty trippy - sometimes a good trip, sometimes a bad trip. Using the technology to learn about the art was pretty challenging for both Andy and me. You can read more about the MONA here.

water droplet words

Interviews with people from Turkey on 40 old school TVs

Me and the technology

We drove the 2.5 hours back to Bicheno partly in the dark. The best part of that dusk timing was the Tasmanian Devil that grinned at us from the side of the road. Both Andy and I knew half way through that drive that we had seen all of Hobart that we were going to see on this trip. Whoever told us we could drive around Tasmania in a day clearly hasn’t done it. Even the A (main) highways were windy and tedious.

Friday was a sunny morning. We headed into town to gather touristy information. I stopped at the local primary school that has a spectacular view of the ocean. I asked to come visit one day next week and was told the principal was unavailable but would email me.

We started with a walk along the foreshore, across spectacularly shaped rocks worn over eons. Incredible views, incredible topography. The path along the land and the rocks was well marked with painted arrows. We spent a long time just checking out all the different types of sea life in the rocks.

After lunch, we drove north a bit up the coast until we essentially four-wheeled down a gravel road to Dennison beach. It was totally worth it.

We ended the day with a night penguin tour. There’s a rookery of about 1000 penguins on the outskirts of town. We stood at the top of the dune and watched as the hungry baby penguins came out of their burrows looking for their parents, and their well-fed parents made their way up the beach to their babies. Andy and I had one baby walk right between us, just inches from our feet. We weren’t allowed to take pictures, but we are supposed to receive some from the company. You can see some at their website. It’s not the height of the penguin season, but we still saw about 50 penguins of all ages and heard hundreds of them from their burrows.

My Art Exhibit Continued

Aboriginal Embassy outside of Parliament in Canberra

Lighthouse in nearby Port Fairy

Loch Ard Gorge in purples

From King's Park, view of the Hopkins River going out to the ocean (whale boats docked at right)

Red-browed Finch, seemingly one-legged, in my series of 4x4 wildlife

Mouth of the  Hopkins River trying to meet the ocean.
This is Andy's sacred place. I painted it for his birthday.

I enjoy painting real scenes from photos, but have also been experimenting with abstract representations. My nephew Orion (the one with a degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) has encouraged me to do more risk taking and diverging from realism. So, these are a result of some of that experimentation.

Rainbow Lorikeet as cartoon

I did this one especially for Orion because I knew he'd dig it.

As yet, unfinished painting of river in NZ. Suggestions?

Experimentation with dot painting

Volunteering in Grade 4

I haven’t given an update on my teacher education learning for a while. I really have been getting quite a lot done with my book chapter and other academic things, but I have also been spending some time at a local primary school. I go in about one morning a week to observe and volunteer in a grade 4 class. The teacher, Jacqui, is very interested in integrating cultural and identity topics and has written a grant so that the school kids can receive art lessons from Tracy, a local indigenous woman. I met Tracy last week and within two minutes, her life history and her passion for teaching kids art just spilled out of her. She was a "stolen child" and told me she always doodled when she was living with her non-indigenous family but it wasn’t until she was an adult that she realized what she was drawing was an aboriginal art style unique to the native people of Southwest Victoria. I can see much attention to indigenous history and art in the hallways of the school. The eel is the sacred totem for this area and so there are many etchings of eels around the school.

First thing in the morning, Jacqui has circle time where students share their successes, their worries, or just how they are feeling that day. Today during morning circle, Jacqui asked the students to share what they were grateful for in their lives. Many of them said their family and friends, and one boy said, “I’m grateful I live where I don’t have to carry a weapon to defend myself. Like in America.” Andy asked me later if I thought he said that because I was there, and I don’t think he even knew I was there at that point. I’m repeatedly saddened by how violence in our culture is perceived by people here.

During math I played a game about place value with Ashley. The rule was that you had to roll the dice for the other person. I wondered if that was typical of Australian practices – doing for others what you could have just as easily done for yourself. Next, the students were asked to get out their “devices” to do an online math activity. Every student in grade 4 is required to have some sort of iPad or tablet. Jacqui told me that for those who could not afford them, there were scholarships and payment plans. I was incredibly impressed with the respect they showed not only for the devices but also for the time they spent on them. One student who did not have one used the smart board, and there are also a few spare devices in the room.

During language arts time, I listened to two different girls read and we were to talk about how punctuation impacted fluency. I shared with them that we call that dot at the end of a sentence a period, where they call it a “full stop.” One girl was reading a text that appeared to be published in the US because in one of the illustrations it featured a US flag and a picture of Abe Lincoln.  I asked the student if she knew who that was, but she didn’t. The second student was reading a book that was either published in the UK or Australia because it used words like "mum" and "splodge" (which I inferred meant something like a combination of splotch and smudge). I looked on the library shelf and found books that I knew to come from the US because I used them as a teacher, even one on Native Americans, and others that appeared to be not from the US. I thought about the variety of perspectives these students get because the sources for their materials are so broad.

The lesson on writing featured the genre of “recount.” My mind went to election politics or having to start over when you're distracted while closing your till. It means to tell a story about something you did or something that happened to you, which I think we would probably call some type of “narrative.” It is so very interesting to me to observe these subtle differences in the ways we talk about and understand the world.

On a side but related note, I noticed an article in the paper today about religion instruction. Government schools are supposed to teach 30 minutes of religion once a fortnight (every two weeks) but different schools approach it differently. If you are interested in knowing more about that, you might read this article.