We acknowledge and respect the Traditional Owners of lands across Australia, their Elders, Ancestors, cultures and heritage, and recognise the continuing sovereignties of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nations.

We respectfully acknowledge the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation, who are the Traditional Owners of the land on which the ACTF is based and pay our respect to their Elders past and present.

We are honoured to have the opportunity to learn from the oldest cultural storytellers in the world and seek to support Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander practitioners to share their rich culture and perspectives with children in Australia and around the world via stories on screen.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this website may contain images, voices or names of deceased persons in photographs, film, audio recordings or text.

ACTF Education Outreach: University of Queensland Workshop

As part of our ongoing outreach to schools, teachers and pre-service teachers, ACTF Education recently presented a virtual workshop on Media Arts for pre-service primary teachers at the University of Queensland.

We spoke with two groups of first-year students about the importance of Australian content in Australian classrooms, emphasising how key it is for students to see stories representative of their own lives. Familiar characters, landscapes and Australian accents enable children to connect to characters and storylines, and this helps them to make meaning of the content.

We also highlighted for pre-service teachers the overlap of media literacy knowledge and skills in the Media Arts and English curriculums. This means that all primary teachers are media educators to some degree, and that an integrated approach to media education makes a lot of sense.

The ACTF Education team also introduced:

Virtual learning opportunities for students to learn from industry professionals, such as our comedy scriptwriting workshops and recent Mustangs FC webinar
The factual entertainment series MY:24 and related filmmaking app, which scaffolds students in making their own short-form documentaries
The ever-popular Little Lunch – primary students can first read the hilarious books by Danny Katz and Mitch Vane and view the television series, analyse the series with the help of our English curriculum resource, then create their own ‘episode’ with our free app.

We greatly enjoyed the opportunity to chat with the enthusiastic UQ cohort, and feedback from both students and lecturers was overwhelmingly positive. We look forward to hearing how the students use our free resources once they are fully qualified and teaching down the track.

Along with students from many other tertiary institutions in Australia and abroad, UQ students have access to a range of ACTF content through Kanopy. Students can log in to Kanopy through their university library portal to find us.

If you are a pre-service teacher or academic wanting to arrange a 2018 group visit to the ACTF, or a virtual session with our education team, please contact: janine.kelly@actf.com.au.