Seeing the world differently

Student activity

Students will reflect personally, explaining how their own personal ideas, values and perspectives have been reconsidered and shaped through their experience of the online exhibition, Eight Days in Kamay. They will appreciate the value of thinking about stories from the past in different ways and will compose a persuasive text evaluating the power of the online exhibition, its stylistic and structural features and its significance in influencing and positioning viewers.   

View of cliffs and sea
Task No. 1

Personal reflection

Reflect on your experience with the Eight Days in Kamay online exhibition. Answer the same three writing prompts as you did prior to accessing the exhibition (don’t look at your previous responses yet!)

  • What I know about Cook, the Endeavour and first contact between Europeans and the Indigenous people of the East Coast of Australia
  • What I think about Cook, the Endeavour and first contact between Europeans and the Indigenous people of the East Coast of Australia
  • What I wonder about Cook, the Endeavour and first contact between Europeans and the Indigenous people of the East Coast of Australia

Compare your post-exhibition responses to those you wrote earlier. Consider how your perspective and knowledge of Cook and first contact has been altered.

Discuss the following questions with your peers:

How has the exhibition:

  • invited you to see the world differently?
  • challenged your assumptions about Cook and first contact with the Indigenous people of the East Coast of Australia?
  • made you feel? (What emotional response has it conjured?)

What features of the exhibition were most significant or had the biggest impact on you personally?

Task No. 2

Write persuasively

Write a persuasive letter to NESA to convince them to include the online exhibition Eight Days in Kamay on the HSC prescriptions for students to study as core texts for the common module: ‘Texts and the Human Experience’. In your letter you must outline the following:

  • How the text links to the rubric
  • Qualities of the text that are worthy of study
  • Personal reflection on what you have found valuable in the exhibition.

Throughout your letter, you must make specific references to key features of the exhibition as evidence to support your case for adding Eight Days in Kamay as a prescribed text.