Hedland College Gives a Practical Lesson

Extract

Is there a teacher in Australia who hasn’t, at some time or other, had a class who were bored and uninterested? While the students might find the lessons tedious, it’s certainly no fun for the teacher to be confronted with students who are listless, restless and convinced that what you have to say isn’t worth listening to.

In the Admission Studies course for Aborigines, the students were required to learn about meeting procedures. Very few of the students had ever been to a formal meeting and it is probably fair to say that they regarded the subject as dull, pointless and irrelevant. Eric Hayward was the Aboriginal lecturer who was trying to teach this subject in a formal manner. He wasn’t succeeding - both he and the students were frustrated and little progress was being made. As a consequence the lecturer gave a great deal of thought about how the teaching of meeting procedure might be made more relevant to the students. He wanted to provide the difficult terminology with practical meaning and set the learning in a real world context. While these goals were quite clear, it took some time to decide on the teaching methodology which should be employed. A method was needed which would make the lessons more interesting and relevant to the students. The method adopted had to ensure the students learnt about meetings and how they are formally conducted.