Section 1.6 Student Narrative |
My name is Taii Andrews. I am a fourteen year old boy. I like playing footy and doing math. English can be boring, but I do like reading good stories and poems, even though I can’t spell. Science is fun sometimes and boring other times. The rest of my subjects are alright, if the teachers are not grumpy!
Phase 1: We had been studying about how media represents people. We had talked about a few different human rights media campaigns and Miss P told us to pay attention because we were going to analyse media campaigns later, work on how to improve them, and get a chance to make some bits up for ourselves. She asked us to have a look online and find any we were interested in, and to think about if our own families and friends were impacted by any of these human rights issues. I thought about my own family. My grandma was taken away from her parents during the whole stolen generation time, and we always felt that a whole part of our history was missing. Some of my friends had parents who were asylum seekers. The research was eye-opening. Miss P could tell that we felt a bit sad about it and so we all talked about how we could combat these issues by spreading awareness, making a real impact. I managed to find campaigns on indigenous rights to share. We looked at campaigns, discussed them and made notes in our Wikispace, without bothering too much to get the notes perfect. At the end of the class, we had looked about eleven different campaigns. Phase 2 Picked our top six with Kahoot and started researching and commenting on the Wikispace. Miss P observed who commented on what, and helped us split into smaller groups and choose one campaign. My group researched on the Closing the Gap campaign which looked at improving indigenous health and education. We assigned hates, but were comfortable to blur lines. Even though it was about health, we saw the campaign touched on many things like Native Title, and the stolen generations. We figured that stress around all of these things could affect people health. Phase 3 When my group found out that my grandma has been a part of the stolen generation, they asked to interview her. We called her on the class phone, and set up a time to interview her, lucky she had Skype, because she lives three hours away from us. My grandma said she doesn’t remember her parents, her siblings or her traditional ways. She has fleeting memories of a beautiful creek and smiling brothers, but she will never know where it was, because she was too young when she was taken. She spoke about Native Title and seemed sad. She said because she knew nothing of her people, and had been removed, then she could never fight for land. She said no wonder there is a gap if I have to live with this stone in my heart. No one can walk around with a Stone in their body and be healthy. Phase 4 The main campaign page seemed a little heavy. It was filled with reports, and official looking things like petitions, and National Close the Gap Day. We decided to do make a meme, to appeal to our age group. We used the Camera Pro App on the iPad, because we found a cartoon called Terra Impossibillius by Nicholson (2002), and made something similair.We took three photos of the same friend: one in traditional clothes and paint, one in his tie and formal uniform, and one in a shirt looking sick and confused. We cloned him into the one picture, put it into the meme generator and captioned it as “Healthy Impossibillius”. We uploaded the meme with an audio clip, so that as you viewed the picture you could hear my grandmothers’ voice asking how you could be healthy if there was a stone in your heart. It was catchy, interesting, a little bit funny, but also sad at the same time, and we thought it would interest people. We published that meme on our Wiki-page with a short explanation. |
Fig. 2: Nicholson (2002): Terra Imposibillis