Scotch College

The revealing MYRiveR Yarra experience

Scotch students are participating in an initiative to encourage and enable young people and their communities to care for our rivers, our land and our future.

Words: Ms Michele Linossier – Academic Extension Coordinator

Real data – real issues – an environmental focus – the Yarra – working with a range of experts in the field – commitment – change – being part of a larger project. All these factors and more made the MYRiveR Yarra experience a must for a group of Scotch students.

This project is an OzGREEN initiative, with schools taking a whole river basin approach to engaging, equipping and enabling youth and their communities to care for our rivers, our land and our future. (More details can be found at http://www.ozgreen.org.au/projects.php.)

 

On a larger scale OzGREEN has made a 10-year commitment to the Murray-Darling. This has involved working with over 1,800 young people from 40 regional communities and 90 schools in ‘taking the pulse’ of the Murrumbidgee (in 2002 and 2006), the Darling (2003 and 2005) and the Murray (2004 and 2007) catchments. The project has included community surveys, detailed environmental assessments of 450 sites, and developing youth voice, vision and action plans to care for the waterways.

The Year 11 Environmental Science class and a group of Year 7 and 9 boys were involved in the first two stages of the process. As a group they collected data from different points of the Yarra with help from the OzGREEN staff. This created an eco-snapshot of the Yarra around Scotch and beyond, stretching from South Yarra to Malvern. The boys took samples of water, observed the surrounding land at each collection point – and began to see the Yarra in a new light.

The next stage involved the small group of Year 7s and 9s attending a single day at a city campus school, with students from other schools from the metropolitan sprawl of Melbourne.

This was an amazing stage where results linking the different sections of the Yarra were connected and analysed by the student group, with support from OzGREEN. The city provided a very challenging backdrop for community surveys. Students spent a part of the day in pairs interviewing people in the city on that day about their views, awareness and knowledge of the Yarra. The student learning curve was steep.

A two-day regional youth congress followed, held at the boatsheds in the city precinct. There was further interpretation and sharing of data, and students worked in mixed groups to develop a connected responsibility. This work highlighted threats to catchment health, developed a youth vision for the future of the river and created action plans to guide the young people in contributing to the care of the catchment.

The initial action plan for Scotch was to develop a website informing the community about the state of the Yarra and environmental concerns, with a view to bringing about change. This project has been continued within the science curriculum this year. GS