Face the facts

Australian Human Rights Commission logo

Activity: Brainstorm your current knowledge of Indigenous Australia, ideally at the beginning of semester.

Resource

Chapter 1: Questions and answers about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples
The Australian Human Rights Commission (2012) ‘Face the Facts’ https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/race-discrimination/publications/2012-face-facts

Activity

Craven  & Price (2011) suggest a Before/During/After (BDA) reading activity based on the ‘what I know, what I want to know, and what I learned’ strategy (http://www.nea.org/tools/k-w-l-know-want-to-know-learned.html) using 5 steps:

  1. Brainstorm and list in a ‘Before’ column everything they want to know about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
  2. After brainstorming, read ‘Face the Facts’, writing new information they find in a ‘during’ column. Importantly, ‘When students locate information in the text that agrees with the information they wrote in their ‘before’ column, they place a tick next to those statements to indicate that their background knowledge was correct’ (Craven & Price, 2011, p. 50).
  3. Summarise the information they have learned in the ‘after’ column.
  4. Conduct a whole group discussion.
  5. Each student identifies three questions they want to follow up with further research.

References

Craven, R & Price, K 2011, ‘Misconceptions, stereotypes and racism: Let’s face the facts’ in Craven, R (ed), Teaching Aboriginal Studies, Allen & Unwin.