Aug 08 2009
The bright lights of Northern NSW: Indigenous Science stars
By Kate Hennessy
On August 16 the Indigenous Science Education Program team from Macquarie University, headed by A/Prof Joanne Jamie, will ditch the city lights and head 10 hours north to Casino High School in the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales.
Casino high school students: proud of their work.
On arriving, Jamie and fellow Macquarie staff and student volunteers will greet what have become the familiar faces of the teachers, aboriginal education assistants and indigenous kids at Casino high school who have been involved since the program began in 2005. The Macquarie Uni team (including postgraduate research students) will commandeer a space large enough to set up eight fun activity stations and gather between 10 to 20 of the indigenous Casino school students for a training sessions with the experiments in the morning.
The newly-trained science demonstrators will then impress their school mates, teachers and attending indigenous elders by running Science Shows over two days for the hordes of students, including junior students, who pass through.
The Science Shows are also run at Maclean high school, a couple of hours south of casino, and are part of National Science Week.
“The indigenous students involved gain a lot of confidence in their abilities,” says Jamie. “And because we work with teachers, elders, parents and carers, they come to see the activities as well and see the potential of the students. Everyone is so proud of each other and it really helps to build relationships.”
The Science Shows explore the chemistry of common household items, discover the microbes we harbour and appreciate the beauty of insects. Activities include making slime with glue and borax; revealing hidden messages with turmeric; seeing the expanding power of a gas; culturing bacteria from participants’ hands and handling enormous stick insects.
“Lots of kids have become repeat demonstrators – they come to back to get involved again,” says Jamie. “We work mainly with kids between Year Nine and Year 11 as the demonstrators but when the younger students see their cousin, brother or sister working as a science demonstrator and want to do it too.”
As the kids become more familiar with the Macquarie University team, the team is peppered with questions about university. As part of the wider partnership with Casino and Maclean High Schools, several students have travelled to Macquarie University over the past few years for other science-related events. The result, says Jamie, is more kids become comfortable with the idea of attending university in the future, a concept that may otherwise have remained remote to them.
“Students show great interest in asking about what team members studied and how their careers had progressed,” says Jamie. “It makes them think more about university in a natural kind of way.”
The Science Shows have an interesting genesis. In late 2004, Macquarie University’s Indigenous Bioresources Research Group, co-directed by Jamie, held a workshop with people from Yaegl and Bundjalung country about bush medicines.
The group was eager to work with elders in these communities to gather information. In exchange, the elders requested help to increase the number of Aboriginal students completing Year 12. The Science Shows were the result of this partnership.
The Indigenous Bioresources Research Group’s work is ongoing but is yielding some exciting results on the medicinal plants used by the elders, including those with antimicrobial properties. The project has also been instrumental in preserving some of the valuable oral history of the elders.
Surveys completed before and after the Science Shows indicate the program is working and that students get a sense of personal achievement and may be more inclined towards science-related studies, and education more generally. The ongoing partnership – the fact that researchers and postgraduate students have now held the shows at Casino and Maclean for four consecutive years – works strongly in its favour.
“The students are really pleased that a university so far away from them is taking such an interest in them, and returns again the next year too, ” says Jamie.
Find out more about the science shows here.
