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.