Year 7 students at Kildare College Holden Hill have designed and created a piece of jewellery inspired by ancient Egypt, as part of the College’s inaugural Project Based Learning (PBL) activity.
The culmination of three years of planning, research and professional development by teachers at Kildare, this exciting, innovative new project supports students in learning many new and relevant skills through an engineering and design process.
The project is part of the College’s Middle Years Vision, which focuses on the three concepts of challenge, inspire and act to foster creative and critical thinking. Students are encouraged to focus on the skills of observation, analysis, collaboration and problem solving.
To establish the PBL activity, Kildare’s Director of Learning Annette Lamont researched the practice of Project Based Learning. All staff then completed a three-day professional development course to learn the practice.
STEM and HUMS teachers then worked together to create the PBL project around the driving question, “How can we capture an aspect of ancient Egypt through the creation of a contemporary piece of jewellery?”.
Teachers learned the art of jewellery making with a trainer from TAFESA to teach their students jewellery making skills, such as considering the use of shapes, materials, linking and construction.
Seeking inspiration for their designs, the students visited the SA Museum and Botanic Gardens to drive thinking about different aspects of ancient Egypt and chose the aspect and symbolism of ancient Egypt that most interested them.
Using an engineering and design process, the Year 7 students then designed and created a contemporary piece of jewellery made from polymer clay, 3D printed plastic, laser cut wood or metal. The jewellery created included rings, necklaces, earrings, bracelets and brooches.
Students were encouraged to be risk takers in both their design and construction methods. They were pushed outside their comfort zone and challenged to be creative as well as analytical.
The PBL activity culminated in a public exhibition at the College to celebrate student creativity and achievement.
The exhibition was not just a chance for students to display the symbolism reflected in their design and their final pieces of jewellery, but to also show earlier prototype pieces of work that demonstrated the process they undertook to achieve the final product.
The trial and error process of designing and creating a prototype, assessing what they had done, and then recreating or changing the next version was where the key aspects of the students’ learning occurred.
“Students were taught that even if their final piece of jewellery doesn’t work the way they wanted it to, the PBL activity is not actually about the end product. It’s about reflecting on what they learned, particularly about themselves and their own capabilities, through the whole design and creation process”, said Annelle Lamont.
“It is about igniting passions through things learned at school. We’ve even had one parent come into the school and ask about jewellery making courses at TAFE as a career option for their daughter after she thrived during the project!”.
As part of the Middle Years Vision at Kildare, the Project Based Learning activity will continue to engender a spirit of inquiry and foster creative and critical thinking in their students into 2020 and the coming years, with other potential cultural inspirations such as ancient Greece or Aboriginal art.
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