As the new school year began, Year 11 students spent their first Human Technologies lessons revisiting why they do HT at ICHK. With no exams and no formal qualifications attached, what are the main purposes of studying this course?

For the first time in many years, I am the teacher of one of the Year 11 Human Technologies classes this year. In our first lesson together, I asked my students to write on a piece of paper, what their learning in HT has been like for the past few years, and what they think they may learn in HT this year.

A student writes,

“Over the years, HT has taught me to think differently, from alternative perspectives, about our lives and the world as a whole.”

Another student writes,

“HT provides us with great opportunities to learn more about people.”

It was heart-warming to see students recognising the “human”-centred approach of HT. As a teacher who has worked with a range of classes and subjects that work towards academic qualifications for over 10 years, teaching Human Technologies has enabled me to think much beyond a traditional “curriculum” - a fixed set of objectives and goals that need to be met, and within a certain time frame.

Human Technologies is more than a curriculum; it is a lens through which materials can be generated and configured. These materials in some ways become the curriculum, but it is constantly changing - fluid, flexible and changeable in size. The more questions a student has in an HT lesson about the materials covered, the greater the appreciation they will have of Human Technologies, in and outside of the classroom.

It is therefore important that Year 11 students, in their final year of having Human Technologies formally incorporated in their timetables, continue to think about the WHYs in Human Technologies. For example, “Why do we play so many games in HT? What is the point of a particular game?”.

Before we begin into our first unit on Attachment Theory in Year 11, we play a game of Memory Board in class. Here, students are asked to first form teams of 4 to 5, and are given different patterns of coloured circles to memorise. They have to repeat the pattern on a physical memory board with as much accuracy as possible. Throughout several rounds of the game, different constraints are added: the patterns become more complex and different rules would be added at times, including having only one person doing the representing of patterns on the board in silence, and changing up group members before the rounds.

Upon reflecting on what they learned through playing this game, the Year 11 students identified many learning opportunities within the process - practising their collaborative and communication skills, learning to cope with stressful situations, experiencing how an increase of cognitive load could affect one’s feelings, and developing self-confidence in a safe-fail environment.

As our journey in HT continues in Year 11, I look forward to seeing students continue to embrace the ongoing inquiries of their learning experiences. The insights from activities such as the Memory Board game highlight not only the skills that they are developing, but also the deeper understandings of themselves and their interactions with others - how to human better!