Teachers, tourist or mountain? The power of children's interests

Following the unfortunate incident of the security fence, we spent some time thinking about how to bring this mantle back to where we would like it, curriculum and morals-wise. 

A few things were clear:

• The children wanted to protect the mountain (good)
• They really didn't care about the tourists (not so good)
• They were willing to resort to violence (also less than ideal)

We considered showing them the tourists' point of view; perhaps a video convention of a tourist at the mountain, scared of the fence and having a miserable time. However, we then decided that, as the children weren't too concerned about tourists, this might not work. 

The question, then, was - what were they concerned about?

The mountain, of course. 

The next session began with a sign on the security fence: Did you think to ask the mountain about this?  The children were instantly interested... who put the note there? Would they be able to talk to the mountain?

I used twilight sort of role (still very much in progress) as a member of the Anangu People (the same people that own Uluru) to suggest that the children could speak to the spirit of the mountain to find out more.  Here, we made some agreements - we agreed that my colleague Miss C would step behind the mountain and speak as the mountain and that the children would be able to talk to the mountain and ask it questions. We also agreed that the mountain needed neither to be 'he' nor 'she'. 

At this point, I was pleased to see the whole class accept that Miss C was the mountain and was speaking the mountain's thoughts. Not once did they giggle or question her authority, despite the fact she clearly was not the mountain. This has taken some practice this year and was good to see. 

The conversation highlighted the problems the mountain had: it had been misnamed, it didn't belong to the explorers, the security fence was upsetting it and it already had enough protection thank-you-very-much (including the blue foxes the children had surprisingly found there).

There was no doubt: the security fence had to come down.

So, to conclude:

Teachers trying to suggest reasons not to use a security fence with weapons: not very persuasive.

The Mountain stating it didn't like weapons and violence and had no need for them: very persuasive.

Following this, the children heard the story of how the mountain came to be. They watched this film showing the importance of Uluru to the Anangu People and created their own films about the importance of their mountain. Having learnt that it actually had a name before they found it, it became: Tjutirangu Puli (Rainbow Mountain).

The children seem to be approaching things more gently now.