Spreading Word of Teaching Materials

May 19, 2022

The Crawford Fund’s NextGen program now has a broad range of free teaching materials for high school students. With the ACIAR-supported teaching materials linked to curriculum for a number of teaching areas, we have been engaging with teacher associations at national and State level across a broad range of subject areas and they have been helping us get word out to their members.

A recent outreach to teachers assured us we are on the right track to excite educators and students to the impact of work around global food and nutrition security and the broad range of career pathways to involvement.

Earlier this month, we held a professional development workshop for the Home Economics Institute of Australia.

Coming up is a presentation to the Geography Teachers Association of NSW and ACT, with a session at their upcoming online symposium ‘Showcasing STEM in Geography,’ a professional learning event for geography teachers across all career stages. It is open to members and non-members including interstate colleagues. The target audience is those who teach geography across Years 7 – 10.

The purpose of the symposium is to demonstrate the scope and relevance of geography as an interdisciplinary discipline which spans the sciences, humanities and social sciences.

“Our teaching resources use contemporary case studies of activities and action in the Asia Pacific on climate change and food and nutrition security, with many examples of projects by the Australian Centre for international Agricultural Research and partners. Our curriculum specialist Heather MacDonald will showcase the Crawford Fund resources, to guide teachers on how to get the most from the resources,” explained the Fund’s Director of Outreach and NextGen program, Cathy Reade.

“The Fund’s session will have a focus on ‘Sustainable Biomes,’ covering our teaching materials linked to climate change, COVID-19 and food and nutrition security in the Asia Pacific region.”

We are pleased to again engage Researchers in Agriculture for International Development  (RAID) Network in our NextGen program with RAID President Belinda Nielsen involved. Belinda is graduate officer in the soil and land management area of ACIAR so well-placed to respond to the teachers’ questions on the power of agriculture and collaborative thinking and her experience of agricultural research creating a better future.

“We are looking forward to the teachers’ questions on the resources and on garnering their wisdom on how the Crawford Fund can better support educators in providing opportunities for students,” said Cathy.

We hope to hold webinars with agriculture and science teachers next!