With partners:
Diversity & Curriculum
Within a community which is increasingly aware of cultural diversity values education has an important role to play. Values education can assist students to develop the skills, knowledge and beliefs which will guide their future lives and help them become part of the Australian and international community. The Federal Government has designated Nine Values for Australian schooling: Care and Compassion; Doing Your Best; Fair Go; Freedom; Honesty and Trustworthiness; Integrity; Respect; Responsibility; and Understanding, Tolerance and Inclusion. It recommends an integrated curriculum approach to their exploration.The new Victorian curriculum, the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS), offers educators this opportunity, as the three strands which encompass key learning areas foster a cross-disciplinary approach to the development of “essential knowledge, skills and behaviours”. The intertwining of VELS and Values Education is particularly important at the Year 9 and 10 pathway level. According to VELS this is the period when students are struggling to create an identity for themselves and develop an independence of mind, beliefs and interests. Embedding values education in the curriculum can help students find their individual life paths.
An effort has been made to link all resources on this website to the domains or subject areas in the Victorian Essential Learning Standards (VELS) three strand integrated curriculum approach.
The first strand, Physical, Personal and Social Learning, covers four domains: Health and Physical Education; Interpersonal Development; Personal Learning and Civics and Citizenship. Health and Physical Education focuses on students’ physical, mental, social and emotional health; Interpersonal Development seeks to enable students to develop relationships and learn to work in teams; Personal Learning centres on the individual learner and personal responsibility for learning; and in Civics and Citizenship students engage with the community and learn about living in a democracy.
The second strand, Discipline-based Learning, encompasses the traditional subject areas of the Arts (Art, Dance, Drama, Media, Music and Visual Communication); English (and English as a Second Language, ESL; Languages Other Than English (LOTE)); Humanities (Economics, Geography and History); Mathematics and Science.
The third strand, Interdisciplinary Learning, contains four domains: Communication; Design, Creativity and Technology; Information and Communications Technology (ICT); and Thinking Processes. In the Communication domain, students acquire skills in listening and viewing, and in the presentation of information. Design, Creativity and Technology introduces students to investigation, design and evaluation of processes and products. In the ICT domain students learn how to use ICT skills to communicate, create, process and present information. Thinking Processes encompasses teaching of thinking skills so that students acquire complex metacognition skills of problem solving, decision making and conceptualising.
For more information on VELS see http://vels.vcaa.vic.edu.au/
To learn more about the research project behind this website, click here.