hi, my name's lauren butterly and i'm a lecturer at the law faculty at the university of western australia i teach indigenous peoples and thelaw as part of the law and society major today i'm focusing on uwa's vision of engaging, transforming and challengingstudents during their learning and for me that's all about getting students to ask why and what i mean by why is not only what the law is but how it came to be that way and howit might be changed and i focus on that in my teaching in two ways
firstly, sharing news items with students and getting them to engage in current affairs seeing what's going on in the world, and second, group activities activities where students get to explore and debate and look at ideas with other students. so, for example in today's tutorial we discussed therecent visit of the united nations special rapporteur on indigenous issuesto canada and he recently put out a media statement about his findings there and we discussed that in comparisonto his report put out about australia in 2009. so what i want toshow you in this video, is an
example of a group activity andthis is a group activity that we did in the week that you're looking at therelationship between indigenous peoples and biodiversity. we were looking at terms such as bioprospecting, biocolonialism and biopiracy which were all quite new terms for the students and they certainly came up with lots of different ideas in their discussion this is particularly useful in my unitbecause i have a lot of exchange students that come and study indigenous peoples and the law and theyhave different ideas about what's going on in the world that they can share witheach other
and also the australian students i am studying law and society under the bachelor of arts degree and lauren always encourages us in this unit to look at wider news articles and current affairs issues hi i'm jake morrison and i'm studying a bachelor of arts majoring in law and society i think it's important to look at current newsarticles and events when studying any unit purely because it makes what we're learning about relevant to the current issues during our studies so instead of looking at things that happened ten
years ago we get to look at examples that are happening now and are happening in our generation and i think that's important we are all exchange students from italy and chile. my name in manuela, my name is bianca my name is simona and my name is julia. i think that this unit has been very useful to learn about australian history and now we can know why the law is how it is knowing this history. and i think it is very important to know other point of view and all the videos, all the documents we have
read about. they help us to understand the reality and how it all affects our lives and the lives of the australian people so what i've shown you in this video is a group activity that my class undertook and also some of the thoughts of my students about the importance of current affairs to their learning. coming back to uwa's vision of engaging, transforming and challengingstudents through their learning. for me it's important for students to understand what's going on in the world around them and to engage with it then to challenge
and transform in learning, you need to be able to debate and see what other people's thoughts are and what the potential problems or benefits or various solutions are