My context is a public comprehensive 7-12 high school in Western Sydney, NSW with close to 2000 students. The school opened in 2015 and has had one cohort complete their Higher School Certificate (HSC). The second cohort will complete the HSC in 2021. The student body is diverse with 59% students from a language background other than English and over 35 languages spoken by students and their families. The size of the school makes it unique—each grade has around 300 students which means, statistically, students should be able to find a community of likeminded peers. The reality is, of course, that students spend five hours a day with the same 20-30 students. Two breaks of 30-minutes allow just enough time for students to eat, drink, speak to a teacher, and spend a little time with their friendship group that is likely formed in their core class. To this end, there is an imperative to provide extra-curricular activities and opportunities and create learning spaces to support the development of a positive school community and so students can meet peers with similar interests, beyond their core classes, in a neutral environment. There is also a need to support students who may not have had any success finding a friendship group in their core class.
My face-to-face teaching load, as Teacher-Librarian, is less than the staff teaching Key Learning Areas. Part of my role, therefore, is to engage students in the library space and support them with accessing the resources and with their assignments. My role of curating the library collection extends to extra-curricular activities which I run twice a week focusing on practical creative skills. The learning space I am focusing on in this instance is one of these groups, the face-to-face Pen & Paper group, that I established in Term 1, 2021 and the subsequent online environment I created when greater Sydney was required to stay at home during the lockdown period to prevent the transmission of the Delta strain of Covid 19.
For more information regarding the demographics of the student body, please see the current school plan:
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