Diversity Australia Assignment

When I first attempted to make a start on this assessment I found it very difficult to settle on a specific topic and/or year level as there was a large amount of content to choose from and I literally did not know what to choose or where to begin. Previously, in other units I have leant towards topics associated with lower primary; however, for this unit I thought I needed to move out of my comfort zone and focus more on upper primary. After initiating conversations with several other students within the unit I decided to develop a series of lesson based around the inquiry question ’Why is Australia home to so many different nationalities?’, derived from the Australian curriculum Year Six inquiry question “Who were the people of Australia and why did they come?” (ACARA, 2016a) for Year Six students to explore and investigate the diversity found in Australia today and for them to appreciate that the diversity found in their classroom, school and wider community is a result of the migration that has occurred over various periods throughout Australia’s history.

With this in mind, I decided to mirror the phases of inquiry identified in the Integrated Inquiry Planning Model outlined by Kath Murdoch (2007) to ensure each lesson was broadly sequential. Consequently, during the lessons students are asked to work either with a partner, in small groups, or as a whole group to assist one another’s learning process, enable students to articulate what they were thinking, to build on their ideas, and to use each other as a sounding board to work towards their solutions. While, the teacher is instructed to use questions and prompts to guide students thinking, encouraging students to construct their own meanings and understandings based on their experiences, to arrive at their own