“Get in. Sit down. Don’t make a sound!”

The boys entered a dark and stuffy room and were immediately stunned. This was not the typical Unit of Inquiry lesson they were expecting.

“This afternoon you have sport. This does, however, depend on whether you meet the expected working quota. You are to scrunch up the crepe paper in front of you and completely fill a plastic cup. These will be used for Year 2’s Christmas Craft.”

“You speak – no sport! You’re not fast enough – no sport! You complain – no sport! Your scrunches are not tight enough – no sport! You even ask to go to the bathroom – no sport!”

After what seemed like a lifetime and at the risk of tears and parent emails, Miss Peterson and Mr Pollard yelled the words “HAPPY PROVOCATION”.

Some still unsure whether they were even allowed to smile, eventually joined the others in a wave of awkward laughter. “How could we not have known?”, “I knew this wasn’t right”, “No one could treat us like that”.

Our final Unit of Inquiry for Stage 2 falls under the transdisciplinary theme: ‘How We Express Ourselves’. The boys have been exploring the central idea: The rights of children can lead to empowerment and responsibility for themselves and others through the concepts of Perspective, Reflection and Responsibility. We used this ‘sweatshop’ provocation to start the start the boys thinking on what was fair and unfair. This then lead to a discussion about rights and which rights were taken away from them. It was a powerful and provocative start to an empowering unit of inquiry.

Since then the boys have begun to collate a series of rights children in Australia and around the world need and deserve. We will now compare these to the UN’s ‘Convention of the Rights of the Child’. From here the boys will use visual literacy strategies to create informative and persuasive texts. The boys will explore their own self awareness and the challenges they, and children around the world, are facing. This will hopefully lead to a sense of empowerment as the boys realise the responsibility we all have in fulfilling the rights of children.

Shayne Pollard – Year 4 Teacher