Parklands Christian College is a small non-government P-12 school located in Park Ridge, Qld. The school is positioned in a semi-rural pocket of Logan shire council; and has a ICSEA score of 1017. There are twenty students in the class, five boys and fifteen girls. The majority of students live on acreage properties in the surrounding area, however some come from nearby suburban areas and a small number travel up to 40 minutes from the outer suburbs of Brisbane. NAPLAN results show the school has a lower than average academic record across each of the tested areas in Years 3, 5 and 9, however the students have a demonstrated flair for creative pursuits and are active in programs such as J Rock. The school has a distinct Christian ethos which is reflected in the school hiring policies, the families enrolled and the care and support given and received in the local community (ACARA, 2010), and is reflected in the positive school atmosphere.

The Year Three classroom is comparably rich in ICT resources; like most in the school, it has an Interactive Whiteboard which is used each day for a variety of lessons and activities and there are shared notebook computers with individual student logins available for weekly use. The teacher, Mrs McCarthy, begins each day with a music and movement activity using YouTube clips, and many lessons begin with 'icebreaker' activities sourced online, with the students expected to interact with the technology and peers in order to complete the activity as well as being linked to the curriculum resources such as the Stepping Stones’ online resource Slate by Orego Education. Surveys using the Miles-Briggs Type Indicator of learning and personality style reveals a high proportion of students who fit into the
'Sensing/Perceiving' and 'Sensing/Judging' quadrant; lesson planning and assessment
is expected to reflect this distrubution of learning styles and temperaments.

This term, the Year Three classes at Parklands have an overall focus on the environment, specifically investigating how to sustain, maintain and re-use our natural resources so that future generations can enjoy healthy flora and fauna, and is reflected in all learning areas in term four. This mini-unit of work ‘The World Around Us’ integrates into this overall environmental theme, drawing from curriculum strands from both the Australian Curriculum as well as Essential Learnings in the subject areas of Science, Geography, English and Information and Communication Technology respectively.
This unit reflects activities and learning experiences shown to suit the specific learning and personality styles of the students as indicated by the Miles-Briggs surveys as students explore how their own behaviour influences the environment, how different contexts utilize sustainable practices, and learn how to reduce the negative effects of consumption by re-using, recycling and composting and address the following issues:

• The Earth has finite resources
• Many human activities have a harmful effect on the environment and all forms of life
• Choices we make about how we live can reduce our consumption of resources

The planning, design and pedagogical approaches chosen for use in ‘The World Around Us’ are informed by current theories on learning, teaching and ICT integration; research suggests that integrated curriculum has been shown to increase student motivation, elicit higher order  thinking, and  build stronger interpersonal skills (Davies, 1992; Vars, 1997) and reflect the students experience in the real world, which is neither fragmented nor boxed into separate compartments that are independent of each other (Turner-Bisset, 2007). The Melbourne Declaration on the Educational Goals for Young Australians (2008) recognises the importance of developing knowledge and skill in Information Communication Technologies (ICT), which supports and enhances student learning across all areas of the curriculum (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2010).
ICT integration is positively related to higher levels of both structural and cultural school characteristics, which highlights the importance of utilizing the specific ICT tools used within this mini-unit. This sustainability focused mini-unit recognises this particular cohort’s semi rural lifestyle and acknowledges that many of the student’s everyday activities facilitate a sense of closeness with the land and environment. ‘The World Around Us’ encourages students to become actively involved in their world, using student-focused pedagogical approaches to promote active and deep learning, and facilitate the development of a sense of moral ownership for the natural environment, and forms the base from which further environmental learning will follow from during the remainder of the term.  

The pedagogical approach taken utilizes Active Learning (Bonwell & Eison, 1991) through a Rich Task (London Gifted & Talented, 2009) to deliver the curriculum. Active Learning is constructivist pedagogy with a student-centred approach, facilitating active engagement in learning, teaches problem solving skills and prepares students to be engaged citizens and competent participants in society (Crum, 1997), which stems from a recognition that the learner comes to the task with prior knowledge and understanding. When new or different concepts are presented, the learner builds on and or modifies pre-existing mental models to form new mental constructs or schemas (Prestridge & Watson, nd). Research shows that Active Learning improves students’ understanding and retention of information and is highly effective in developing higher order cognitive skills such as problem solving and critical thinking (California State University, 2012), which facilitates greater learner autonomy, agency, and personalization (McLoughlin & Lee, 2008). This pedagogical approach is congruent with Rich Tasks which, according to the Department of Education, Training and Employment (2001), must meet three distinct criteria:

1. It must be purposeful and model a real-life role with real problems to solve and engages learners in forms of pragmatic social action that have real value in the world.
2. Secondly it must have challenging and substantive intellectual value through creating challenges which require identification, analysis and resolution, and require students to analyse, theorise and engage intellectually with the world.
3. Thirdly it must be transdisciplinary: transdisciplinary learnings draw upon practices and skills across disciplines while retaining the integrity of each individual discipline.

Research by the London Gifted and Talented organisation (2009) suggest that as students come from a wide range of backgrounds and have various levels of prior knowledge and understanding, the open-ended nature of the rich-task allows for a wide range of responses, provides for a wide range of abilities, opportunities for higher level thinking, encourages critical thinking and creativity, provides varying levels of challenge, offers students the opportunity to show their achievement capabilities and are interesting and motivating; rich tasks allow both basic levels of learning but provide opportunities for pupils to move beyond this.