Students’ participation and understanding in senior social studies is enhanced when teachers connect the content of learning to their lives (Social Sciences BES, p.56).
Methods that engage | Communications technologies | DIL | Resources
Who are my students? Consider age, gender, ethnicity, ability to self-manage, their personal interests and desire to be engaged with their communities.
Connect social studies achievement objectives to relevant content:
Level 6 AO 1: Understand how individuals, groups, and institutions work to promote social justice and human rights.
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Level 7 AO1: Understand how communities and nations meet their responsibilities and exercise their rights in local, national, and global contexts.
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Level 8 AO1: Understand how policy changes are influenced by and impact on the rights, roles, and responsibilities of individuals and communities.
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Level 6 AO 2: Understand how cultures adapt and change and that this has consequences for society.
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Level 7 AO2: Understand how conflicts can arise from different cultural beliefs and ideas and be addressed in different ways with differing outcomes.
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Level 8 AO2: Understand how ideologies shape society and that individuals and groups respond differently to these beliefs.
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Choose content and select resources that are inclusive and responsive to the diversity of your students. Connect with them by selecting learning methods that relate to them and keep them engaged. Engage them in discussions about what helps them learn effectively. Involve them in choices of ways to approach learning and planning next steps in the learning.
Social networking and communications technologies can make the learning process more personal and efficient. An example could be setting up a website for students to share resources, and using Google docs to enable collaborative learning and allowing the teacher to give on the spot feedback and feed-forward on the same document from any location or even using a mobile phone.
Digital Information Literacy (DIL) is the ability to recognise the need for, to access, and to evaluate electronic information. The digitally literate can confidently use, manage, create, quote, and share sources of digital information in an effective way.
The way in which information is used, created and distributed demonstrates an understanding and acknowledgement of the cultural, ethical, economic, legal, and social aspects of information.
The digitally literate demonstrate:
When preparing resources be aware of how diversity can be made visible or can reinforce bias. When considering the Pasifika population, for example, it may involve multiple ethnicities, languages and cultures, and comprise people born in the Pacific Islands and those born in New Zealand. When studying Pacific peoples adapting to living in New Zealand (as part of achievement objective 6.2) the question of how immersion in Aotearoa New Zealand society has impacted on Pasifika individuals would encompass a range of the Pasifika groups. Student understandings, when exploring differing values and perspectives, may be influenced by the resources they are engaging with.
Last updated March 29, 2021