During
our third year, we started working closely with teachers of Catholic High
School (CHS) as their secondary 1 Geography was starting 6 months (January
2010) earlier than Xinmin Secondary School (XSS) (July 2010). Aims of the
curriculum design were: - to help learners understand and advance their own
resources (i.e., experiences and ideas) as epistemic communities and
- to
engage learners in meaning-making and experiential learning activities that
integrates a computer game and other tools.
We use the term “integrated” as the
computer game is one of the tools that help connecting various concepts, ideas,
and experiences. We hoped that this approach encourage learners to create their
own academic discourse and build ideas together, so that they can learn the
geographic subject matter deeply and with understanding, as opposed to rote
memorization. With these aims, we set out principles for our design of
curriculum:- engage
them in group activities (developing epistemic communities);
- start with
open-ended questions that could encourage the use of their preconceptions and
their own approaches (setting up the meaningfulness of the topic);
- engage
them in activities that provide relevant experience (using game or other
tools)
- require
them to produce group or individual artifacts (encouraging their ownership of
the process and product);
- develop a
sharing mechanism of the class (encouraging making their ideas public and
further conversations);
- and engage
them in consolidation and linking activities (understanding the connections and
gaining confirmation about their ideas).
For
our implementations, instead of using such fundamentally different approaches
in few lessons, we, together with teachers, decided to work together for the
entire durations of Secondary 1 geography curriculum. We believed that changing
the classroom culture and developing an epistemic community could not happen
with just few lessons. At the same time, we gain design knowledge by being in
the classroom and seeing what engages them in relation to our designs.
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