Our high college students have been exploring indigenous Australia from many different perspectives this term. To give you a snapshot – studying Australian History is an obvious avenue through which we can build a deeper appreciation and understanding of our country. We also explored many aspects of our country’s incredible geography. In English the students studied several areas including Australian films that presented different viewpoints. These learning modules have enabled our students to examine the cultural nature of our amazing land. To complete the term and our Indigenous Project, we’ve turned our attention to science, looking at two very different ways of perceiving the world, our environment and specifically, our Australia.
Science is the way that we answer questions that relate to the natural order of things. Indigenous Science has been around for thousands of years and comes out of an inner picture of the world. Contemporary Science has grown very much out of the time of the Renaissance, when such great discoverers and inventors as Leonardo de Vinci and Galileo began looking at the world through ‘different’ eyes. Several centuries before that it was considered that ‘thinking’ took place in the heart. Today the process of thinking is clearly seen as being a ‘head’ process.
What does it mean I wonder, to ‘think’ with the heart?
Indigenous Australians, so many thousands of years ago, like people of today, sought to answer questions relating to our earthly existence, those ‘big’ questions that each of us will grapple with at some stage in our lives. Their answers came from a very different place to those of contemporary science, where the process is to observe, make theories, experiment and work to find ways to prove or disprove them.
Our students are presently being asked to explore these different approaches and to build for themselves ideas and to determine the place and validity of the different approaches.
We finish the term and these science modules at the end of next week and I am very much looking forward to reading each of our students’ final essays on the subject.
Regards,
Rodney
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