February 2, 2023
“Development for a Better Future” – making it easier for teachers with updated materials
We have a big year ahead for our ACIAR-funded activities to excite high school educators and students to the impact of work around global food and nutrition security and the broad range of career pathways to involvement.
We’ve listened to teachers and our teaching materials have all been updated and now each has an assessment tool to save educators precious time.
In addition, we will have:
- A School Competition – $1000 to be won
- Professional Development Workshops and Webinars for Educators
- School Talks by Food Security Specialists
Read more on each below:
Updated Materials with Assessment Tools
The Crawford Fund has been engaging with high school educators about our free high school teaching materials on food and nutrition security issues. On their advice and to save educators precious time, we have updated our “Development for a Better Future” materials and they also now include an assessment tool (rubric) in each of the seven modules.
“These assessment rubrics will support educators to interpret student’s work against criteria and standards as outlined in the Australian National Curriculum and NSW syllabus. The culminating activities provide an insight into the student’s achievement against the Geography curriculum for Years 9 and 10,” explains the Crawford Fund’s curriculum specialist from Education Partnerships, Heather MacDonald.
Please register here even if you have already done so to get access to the free materials. This will mean we have your contact details to alert you to our upcoming professional development workshops and webinars.
The Assessment Rubric supports educators to:
- Brief students on expectations related to the project work.
- Help students to evaluate their work as they progress.
- Consistently apply standards when assessing tasks.
- Promote consistency in shared marking.
The following updated materials are available:
- Year 9-10 Educator Guide
- Senior Secondary Educator Guide
Seven modules for Years 9 and 10 on the themes of:
- Climate Change, Food and Nutrition Security
- Climate-Smart Technologies
- Covid-19 and Food and Nutrition Security
- Australia – A Powerhouse for Agricultural Research
- Gender dimensions in agriculture
- Genebanks – more than saving seeds, and
- Food loss & waste
A Senior Secondary Educator Guide and Module on:
- Unit 3 Land cover transformations – Project Based Learning Guide
Again, please register here even if you have already done so to get access to the free materials.
We will also be alerting national and State teacher associations about the updated materials and competition in the coming weeks.
Show us what you know and your school could win $1000
We are launching a competition for students who are in year 9-10 that use the teaching materials. The teaching materials provide an opportunity for students to develop videos, blogs, essays, PowerPoints, ‘how to’ guides, field reports and social media campaigns on the food and nutrition security topics on which the modules are focused.
Schools submit a video of less than three minutes duration which is either the culminating activity of one of the modules or a video explaining what the student did and learned using the module. One entry will win $1000 for their school. Schools are welcome to submit more than one entry!
Entries will all be profiled on our website so that student learning can be shared. We will also be sharing their products with our network of Australian funding and research institutions! We have every confidence that Australian students will come up with some great ideas.
More details on the competition are here.
Professional Development Workshops and Webinars for Educators
It has been great to get such a positive response from teacher associations in spreading the word of our teaching materials since we launched the initial set back in late 2020. We now have updated educator guides and modules and are keen to support educators in using them.
Following previous educator webinars on the materials and the great response to the workshops we held in January 2023 at the National Association of Agricultural Educators, we are pleased to be presenting in-person and online professional development workshops for educators in 2023, to explain the new materials and their educator guide and assessment rubrics.
The workshops will be held through educator associations, so if you are part of an association and would like to be included in a workshop, please let us know if you haven’t already registered your interest by downloading the teaching materials. All educators who have registered for the materials will be alerted to our workshops and webinars.
School Talks by Food Security Specialists
We would like to hear from schools who are using our materials! It would be great to organise an online or in-person talk by an Australian working on an international development project in food and nutrition security to talk to the students in schools working on one of the seven modules. If this opportunity is of interest, please contact Cathy Reade, our Director of Outreach and Manager of the NextGen Program if you’d like to learn more about these possibilities.
We have no doubt that involving young Australians in international agriculture and agriculture for development has meaningful and beneficial outcomes for food and nutrition security, for the students and for Australian agriculture.
