“The creation of our cow, our Archibull blog and the multimedia components of the Archibull Prize have all offered the students’ opportunities to inform, inspire and affect their audience. It is a powerful means of developing student voice in the community. This is a task that will inspire careers in agriculture and provide the students with the knowledge and skills to instil change in the industry and more importantly, instigate appreciation and an understanding of our Agricultural enterprises in society.
The project based learning approach of the Archibull Prize program is innovative and embraces 21st century learning skills. The students worked in a united team, collaborating to find direction and solve problems. The student group developed autonomy and developed an authentic ownership over their work. Each member of the group found their strengths and were supported by the group and celebrated for their contributions to the group. The Archibull Prize created a cohesive, intrinsically motivated and driven team.
The Archibull Prize has developed the students' skills in problem solving, communication and negotiation. Our students thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of producing a creative, meaningful and beautiful response to their world.”
“The Archibull Prize program has strengthened our community by introducing new technologies for teachers and students. It has engaged all of us in our learning and has promoted sustainability living through our school. As a result of undertaking this project students have increased their knowledge and understanding of agriculture and the importance of raising the profile of the agricultural industry. Students have learnt many new skills such as painting a larger scale 3D object, conveying a powerful message through art whilst at the same time working together as a team across a range of age groups to achieve a common goal of completing the project to a high standard. This project increased student engagement in their learning, as well as some students discovering a new talent and interest in art, digital media and drama. The range of presentations including art, technology, drama and movie editing enabled greater student participation and access to the program. This program has raised the profile of agriculture within our school and the wider community, showing the agricultural industry is highly valued and acknowledging the significant impact agriculture has on our daily lives.”
“The Archibull Prize is a wonderful and innovative program which provides students with vast opportunities to explore the many farming industries in Australia.
The Archibull Prize gives city kids the opportunity to explore what their country cousins do on the farm. One of the wonderful things about this program is the links and ties students learn about as we go on this journey together. Students begin to see and understand just how vital Australian farming is to the economy and indeed in their day to day lives. This is reinforced by a visit to our school from our allocated Young Farming Champion.
The Archibull Prize emphasises multifaceted learning through a variety of different media. It gives students the opportunity to learn about the Australian farming way of life, while also facilitating strong ties between teamwork and learning. All learners who participate in the Archibull Prize are active learners and often times, it is the students who direct how we are going to learn – leading to high levels of engagement and enthusiasm towards learning.”
“As a result of this program, students learnt so much about the wool industry. All the different process wool can go through to get different products. As I led the technology team I saw strong improvements in student capacities in coding, blogging, image use, resource management, problem solving and infographic creation.”
“The West Pennant Hills Public School Archibull Prize project was created through the collaboration of an array of staff and students. Although originally intended for Stage 1, as the unit progressed we soon required expert skills and knowledge in order to drive the stage 1 investigation tasks successfully.
Such help materialised with the arrival of Year 5 ICT gurus, artistic teachers and up-skilled and knowledgeable students who could provide our enthusiastic students with the information, programs and skills required to ensure all Stage 1 students not only understood what we were investigating but had the capability to communicate their understandings in an interesting and engaging way.
In keeping with our ‘Farm to Plate’ curriculum focus, students not only investigated cotton but also diversified to investigate everything from milk, rice, fish and honey. Experts were called in to deliver presentations, thus ensuring students could make real life connections at every turn. This reinforced how important the ‘Farm to Plate’ theme was and how it related to them both now and in the future.
In order to give students a hands on experience of setting up and running a vital cog in the supply chain of food and fibre, students worked collaboratively to design, build and run their own farms on Minecraft in order to service the local community of ‘E Street’. Students used their acquired knowledge of biosecurity in order to ensure their farms and stock were safe and secure at all times. We even grew our very own cotton drops at school…..well, they grew at school.
We had a fabulous time on our journey. We got ‘hands on’ and used our inquisitive natures to guide our journey all the way to where we find ourselves now. It has been a wonderful experience and something we would very much love to do again. Thank you!”
“This is a great initiative to encourage students to learn and build confidence around farming and natural resources, how the food they eat can be impacted by challenges like climate variability and biosecurity threats and to find out more about future career opportunities.”
“The Archibull Prize program communicates that safe food starts in the paddock and ends on your plate. Ensuring farmers are able to supply safe, affordable and healthy food is a shared responsibly and this an important message that we need to deliver to our future generation.”
“The Archibull Prize program is an innovative, cross-curricular approach taking a leading role in engaging positively with school students across the country. NSWDPI has successfully partnered with Art4Agriculture to share the message biosecurity is a ‘shared responsibility’.”
“Each year I am more and more excited to see the variety of designs and concepts schools have created around their agricultural industries – each school has a different interpretations of the theme, which is always such a highlight to see. It’s about students finding what resonates with them, what captures their attention and what message they want to talk to the public about. You end up with a fascinating and diverse overview of Australian agriculture and you never know what to expect from one Archie to the next. The imagination, the freedom and the inventiveness students put into their Archie artworks is phenomenal. Art is a captivating way of informing and educating by telling a story that gets people to stop and look - and the Archibulls certainly do that wherever they are displayed. Some are vibrant and beautiful to look at, while others are subtle, complex and intelligent. They’ve all got a really important message to tell and I absolutely love that side of it.”
“Commendations must go to Art4Agriculture in their array of educational resources that support teachers implement the new Australian Curriculum. Educators can discover a suite of Young Farming Champion Videos; YouTube videos, Blogposts, presentations and information to assist them in implement ‘food and fibre production’ as a topic in the classrooms. There are also creative and stimulating programs to get involved in too, thereby integrating The Arts and Humanities too”
“I have been evaluating education for sustainability programs in Australia since 2000. After reviewing all the program documentation in order to support your evaluation work, I consider that ‘The Archibull Prize’ is one of the best expressed sustainability related educational programs I have seen. It has a strong internal logic; is innovative and from what I can see, is likely to be highly engaging. The resources are well-expressed in supporting teachers and their students to build knowledge, skills and attitudes using 21st Century learning approaches. I am impressed by the combinations of visual arts, social media, team collaborative learning as well as linking students and school communities with Young Farming Champions.”
“The Archibull Prize provides the opportunity for fun, student-driven learning that enables both students and teachers to explore the complexities of food and fibre production in the context of global trends. It allows them to gain an understanding of the social, political, economic, environmental and moral factors that come into play as a farmer and a consumer and how, collectively, all our decisions have an impact on the sustainability of our communities. It allows students to explore the science, technology, engineering and mathematics behind agricultural innovation bringing relevance to the school curriculum for students in an authentic and engaging context to illuminate career pathways they may not have considered before, helping us attract the best and brightest to this important field. And the Archibull Prize allows them to create beautiful cows.”