Teacher information

The English unit, The Mount Morgan Experience, is designed to introduce lower secondary school students to the romance and realism of Australia’s gold mining heritage. A visit to Mount Morgan will provide the ambience that helps recreate a way of life that forms so much of the Australian myth of mateship and resilience in hardship while demonstrating the impact of change on communities. A wide variety of activities and exercises offer both teachers and students freedom of choice in selecting those segments best suited to individual school’s programs.

The board game exercise is a useful method of encouraging students to read about Mount Morgan and its history prior to their visit and to orient themselves to the town itself and its many historical sites. The board game falls into the operational strand of the curriculum and involves reading and viewing, selecting and applying information.

Accessing this web site and/or reading the material thereon may be approached as an individual or small group activity, depending on the availability of computers. It could be used in conjunction with the board game or used to begin the development of lists of adjectives and adverbs that will prove useful to the students as they attempt to express their affective experiences.

It is envisaged that students will be exposed to/taught a variety of poetic forms before their excursion to equip them with the literary tools they need to complete the tasks set. On excursion, students will have the opportunity to gather impressions and enjoy a unique affective experience and use written and visual text to reflect on the many aspects of life in an Australian mining town over the last century and a half.

The extracts and photos on the website also provide background material for Performance Poetry (specifically Bush Poetry). This activity fits both cultural and operational strands of the curriculum and involves using information extracted from the website and the excursion to make choices and create poetry appropriate to the chosen social context, situation and setting.

A broad range of writing tasks across a variety of genres and audiences are offered in the worksheets. Students must practice both speaking and listening skills to interact with the Guides when gathering the information needed to complete the writing exercises. Teacher monitoring of responses can reinforce awareness of appropriate form and tone for the chosen audience. There is an opportunity for students to employ idiom and jargon appropriate to the speaker they have chosen so that both cultural and operational strands of the curriculum are addressed by means of speaking and listening, writing and shaping.

There is a strong cultural emphasis in the exercise where students read or listen to the stories of local people and participate in a discussion of the idiom of the bush poet. Students will be able to deconstruct poems and songs against the background of the reality of Mount Morgan and an informed awareness of the challenges of life in a mining town. Discussions in the classroom should move into the critical strand so that the outcome is a rounded view of bush poems and songs. An informed appreciation of the genre will equip students to write and perform their own poems.

It is envisaged that these activities could result in the development of an anthology of poetry entitled “The Mount Morgan Experience” and the individual performance of each student’s bush poetry. The anthology could include an overview of the motivations and opinion that led to the development of the poems, the poems themselves (using a variety of poetic forms and techniques) as well as an personal self- evaluation of the effectiveness of the exercise in expressing the student’s affective understanding of their Mount Morgan experience.