Shiralee is a Noongar/Gunaikerai woman. She wrote the book on helping indigenous actors tell their stories. She created the Indigenous actors’ programs at both WAPPA and VCA. She has provided countless hours of cultural education for non Indigenous audiences. When developing this program she proposed that the best way, for non-indigenous audiences, to access it, was to get inside it. Eagles Nest Artistic Direct, James Adler immediately saw the value of supporting this culturally informed pedagogic angle.
Getting Inside Rainbow’s End
Together with cultural educator, Shiralee Hood, we have created an exciting and new style of program for students studying Jane Harrison’s Rainbows End. It uses immersion to help English students understand the text and support them to express themselves in written assessment tasks.
Together, Shiralee and James will guide students as key scenes are read out loud. Being in the play, exploring the characters and talking openly, in a supportive environment, will help students enormously to empathize with a narrative that might otherwise seem foreign.
Eagles Nest Is very excited to be trialing this new approach and that the idea comes from an educator familiar with the challenges of teaching Indigenous narratives.
indigenous cultural themes
GETTING INSIDE RAINBOW's END
2 hourS
$24 PER STUDENT
$2400 Minimum booking fee
Writing About Country
Shiralee is a proud indigenous Noongar/Gunaikernai woman. James’ family is of migrant and refugee origin. Both have lived in city and rural Australia. Their combined heritage enables them to offer unique insight into the theme, the mentor texts, and the ways suggested by the VCAA that students could write about country.
Short writing exercises in this workshop focus on, pre and post-colonial “Australia”, city and country, migration, resettlement, identity (and losing one’s home/country) as well as discrimination.
Given that Split was written by a Noongar woman, Shiralee’s people, we strongly suggest that schools choose this as one of the two mentor texts we explore on the day. Her knowledge could be what opens the door to writing about country with reference to indigenous Australia
indigenous cultural themes
WRITING ABOUT COUNTRY
2 hourS
$24 PER STUDENT
$2400 Minimum booking fee
Teacher’s Professional Development Seminar
In each session, material from the 4 different workshops is used. The ideas and activities are transferable for any theme. There is also time for group discussion of the pedagogic intentions behind activities. We want teachers to be able to implement what they learn in a variety of different school environments. The discussions may be particularly helpful as our approach may differ from how you are teaching this syllabus thus far. The other highlight of this seminar is that you will have access to all 5 facilitators of the student workshops. Each of them has different skills and approaches to teaching and writing and this seminar is the only way you can access them all in one day.
indigenous cultural themes
TEACHER's professional development seminar
6 hourS
FEB 17th - 1 session only
Featuring Shiralee Hood
$320 PER teacher
download our program for group pricing