Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

15 minutes	Part A: Importance of hope in times of disaster
30 minutes	Part B: How stories create hope
60+ minutes	Part C: Creating stories that evoke hope
15 minutes	Reflection

Part A: The importance of hope in times of disaster

Step 1.

Ask students if they know what Psychological First Aid is and discuss the key components of Psychological First Aid. You may like to start the lesson by presenting the text and then consolidating the information.

Psychological first aid is a psychosocial support activity that helps people affected by an emergency, disaster or traumatic event. It is a ‘humane, supportive response to a fellow human
being who is suffering and who may need support’.

Psychological first aid is useful as the first thing that you might do with individuals or families following a disaster. It is most widely used in the first hours, days and weeks following an event. However, there can be situations months or years after an event that trigger strong stress reactions, such as anniversaries of the event or experiencing or witnessing something
similar which reminds someone of the stressful experience.

Source: Australian Psychological Society and Australian Red Cross (2011) Psychological First Aid: An Australian guide to supporting people affected by disaster.

Step 2.

Ask students to pair up and discuss why and when someone might require Psychological first aid? Roam the classroom to ensure students are covering main topics such as:

fires
floods
emergency
accidents
grieving a traumatic event
personal crises
social challenges
health challenges
disasters caused by natural hazards
human-caused disasters
violence
armed conflict
forced migration.

Step 3.

Present students with an image and the prompt:

Why do you think hope is one of the key elements of Psychological First Aid?

m in
Kangaroo Island. Image Credit: Lisa Maree Williams / Stringer. www.minderoo.com.au.

Facilitate a brief discussion about why hope is important in relation to disaster resilience and project some of the questions as discussion points:

How does hope help people overcome and rebuild their lives during and after a crisis?
Why is hope important for someone’s mental health and their ability to move on emotionally and physically?
Write down a specific dialogue that could take place during the hope stage.

Step 4.

Ask students to source their Student Worksheet from their previous lesson, which outlined five different individuals or organisations who have created hope in a community. Give them some time to read over their tables and refresh their memories about who these people were and what qualities they had that allowed them to generate hope.

Step 5.

Ask students to turn to a partner, and have a five-minute discussion about the people they had chosen and which one of them they would most like to investigate further.

Part B: How stories create hope

Step 1.

As a class, read through the article on their Student Worksheet, entitled ‘How Stories Create Hope.’ Ask students to highlight a word, a sentence and a paragraph that they think is particularly relevant, as you are reading.

Step 2.

Facilitate a discussion with students about the words, sentences and paragraphs they chose to highlight. You could ask one student to share, and see if anyone else in the class also highlighted the same thing. When students share what they highlighted, ask them, “What made you highlight that word/sentence/part?” Encourage them to justify and elaborate on their thinking. The goal of this activity is for students to be engaged in the article, and to consider the big ideas.

Step 3.

Throughout this discussion, seek to determine what Fivush’s contention is - that through telling stories we can evoke hope for the future in both the storyteller and the reader.

If you have already read the article or would like examples of other individual people that evoke hope consider discussing the following individuals and how they embody hope:
Dylan Scott Australian of the year
Malala Yousafzai - Malala’s story malala.org/malalas-story.

Part C: Crafting stories that evoke hope

Step 1.

Explain to students that they will be putting the writer’s contention to the test in the following activity by taking their chosen individual who evoked hope and writing a first-person narrative about how their hope could facilitate social change.

Step 2.

Please spend some time with students reviewing the parameters of this story using the below information checklist found on their Student Worksheets.

A personal narrative or personal recount is nonfiction storytelling based on real thoughts, feelings, or experiences. It is told in the first person (using I, me, and my), and the writer draws upon their live events, or the life events of others to create a story. This type of writing is also known as creative nonfiction because it combines literary devices with nonfiction recounts.

When writing (use this as a checklist):
Describe events chronologically or in order to show how things built over time.

Try using conjunctions to link events together and show how time is sequencing.

Organise your big ideas into different paragraphs (see the planner below for more detail.)

Write in first person, past tense - these things happened to a particular person and happened in the past.

Make sure you include feelings, opinions and ideas about the experience of your chosen person - be descriptive to hook your reader!

Step 3.

Provide time for students to plan out their stories, using the planning guide to support them. This guide encourages them to consider the events of their chosen person’s life at each stage of the narrative structure so that they can structure their responses. However, students are welcome to experiment with this structure if it does not reflect the event/s they wish to explore.

Step 4.

When they have planned their stories, students will need to begin writing. There is space for them to draft/write on their Student Worksheets, or you may like them to type their responses. The amount of support they have, and the time frame for writing, is up to teacher discretion. They may need time outside of class to complete this task.

Step 5.

When their stories have been written, ask students to use a device to audio record themselves narrating their stories. They should do their best to use their voice pace, pitch, tone and modulation to create an enjoyable listening experience for an audience. Collate all student recordings into a class podcast of Stories of Hope: How hope changes the world.

As the teacher, it would be recommended that you scaffold the audio recording process and record an example with your students while expressing various forms of pace, pitch, tone and modulation.

Step 6:

Once all the recordings have been completed you may like to create a recorded exhibition and invite students from other classes to attend online or in person.

What would an exhibition look like?

That is entirely up to you and the class. However, one example is to create an online exhibition called “Sounds Like Hope”,“How Hope Changed The World” (as mentioned above), “Hopeful Futures” etc. The exhibition would support the ideas around affirmations, positive mindset, rebuilding, resilience etc during the crisis and could turn into a platform where people could visit when in need of hope. Alternatively, the platform could lend itself as a space for others to share their experiences and how they have overcome them.

Reflection

Provide students time to sit and listen to the narrated stories of their classmates. While they are listening, encourage them to note down two or three things they learned about how hope changes the world.

Differentiated learning

Extension

For students who require an extension, you may like to provide them with the opportunity to find other people they believe show exemplary hope and to include a discussion about how they are similar or different.

OR

Alternatively, if you wish to enhance learning, you could suggest students create a film rather than a podcast; this is a little more complex and would require students to consider the following:

production
set
script
background music
guest appearances.

Provisions for learning support

Similarly to the extension options, students with individual needs may benefit from a reduced word count and a discussion about the character they choose to write about. They may need support in planning out their ideas using the planner. Depending on their abilities, it may be beneficial for them to think of a time they found hope and write about their own experience.

Teacher reflection

Take this opportunity to reflect on your own teaching:

What did you learn about your teaching practice today?
What worked well?
What didn't work so well?
What would you share?
Where to next?
How are you going to get there?

Resilient Australia - Building Resilience To Natural Disasters - Stories Of Hope

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