Class 9 Geography - Forces that Shape the Earth: Mountain Building

Class 11 Life Skills

In class 11, the students undertake a year of learning various life skills. From how to understand political parties and cast informed votes, to gaining employment and managing money, to cooking and making good nutritional choices.

This term, the cooking group have been learning about the glycaemic index and making breakfasts that will sustain their energy through Main Lesson. They have researched the importance of healthy fats, protein and the benefits of cooking with fresh herbs.

Suzie Moore
High School Biology

Class 12 Projects

Avia Frankham

For my Class 12 project, I will be asking:

“How can an alternative perspective on the Russia/Ukraine war provide a fresh narrative that can break down pre-existing bias?” 

This question came about after I visited my exchange student in Vienna in the summer holidays of 2024. I had been struggling to find a question that truly interested me. I’d gone down a rabbit hole exploring U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, and while I knew I wanted to step away from that, my fascination with American politics and U.S. intervention in global affairs remained. While I was there, I reconnected with two Ukrainian women who had fled from the war. One night in 2022, they knocked on my exchange family’s door holding a small dog with a plea for a place to stay. I was moved by their story.

So instead, I decided to look into the Russian/Ukrainian war and the role the U.S. is playing in it.

Another aspect of my Project is looking at how the media has played a major role in creating a narrative in many western countries that the Ukraine has done nothing wrong, and that Russia has absolutely no justification or reason for their attack.  I am looking into the history and events that led up to the 2022 invasion and how America used its power to influence and manipulate Ukraine. I have begun to see how in the Western media there a strong anti-Russian bias and I wondered why. My question developed and my interest in finding the Russian perspective deepened. This year I hope to shed light on a different perspective in this conflict and possibly broaden the understanding that people have of the war.

When researching this topic, I am aiming to remain objective when receiving firsthand emotional information to create an opinion that is as unbiased as possible. Through translated conversations with the Ukrainian women, I realised just how serious this conflict is and has been. I am in contact with Ukrainian people in Kiev and the stories they tell and the videos they show push my limits in remaining objective. On the other hand, hearing from Russians whose lives have been shattered, trapped in poverty under a dictator, with their own people also suffering and dying also changes my view. When doing research, I struggle with the feeling of being conflicted it’s almost as if I can see so clearly the pain and anger from both sides. Understanding the Russian perspective has been especially challenging—not only because it differs from the Western narrative, but also due to the heavy censorship laws that restrict access to information.

Since starting my research an event that has really stood out to me is the Euromaidan protests in 2014 in the Ukraine. The protests started when the president Yanukovych decided that instead of securing closer ties with Europe, he wanted to join Russia and rekindle their relationship. These protests were named the anti-Russian movement by the Russians and in return they invaded and took back Crimea. Fighting then began in Ukraine until a ceasefire came about in the Minsk Accords of 2015. The Minsk Accords were never implemented and Russian officials claimed that Ukraine was secretly preparing for a military attack on the states fighting Kiev and that they would force them to reintegrate rather that follow the Minsk Accords. This shows how deeply the relationship between these two countries run and how the historical context is one of the most important things to look at when researching a conflict.

For my practical component, I'm working on three posters representing Ukraine, Russia, and the U.S. My intention is to show people the other side of this war. I  hope to show how the U.S. has influenced the conflict and played a huge role in the escalation of the conflict. To evoke critical thinking on the war and to share my perspective and journey throughout the year.

I do not believe I will have a definitive answer at the end of the year, but I hope I will take the research and hard work I’ve done and use that when looking at other conflicts in the media.

If anyone has any connections to the Russia/Ukraine war and wants to talk to me about it, you can contact me by emailing: class12projects@pws.wa.edu.au.

Callum Siah

Hello. my name is Callum, and for my topic I have decided to explore the various benefits of the plants that people generally consider to be “weeds”.

“What benefits do weeds, especially edible ones, bring for humans and the environment?”

Since I was little, I’ve had an interest in weedy edible plants. Like other kids I would often partake in eating the wild oxalis (sourgrass) plants that grow almost anywhere. This interest in edible plants that need no tending continued as I got older, and whenever I saw a plant growing by the path, or in a field, or anywhere that it was just growing without humans, I would wonder: “Can I eat it?”  This interest stayed with me all the way up to high school, and I even gained a slight reputation amongst some of my friends for willingly eating random plants that grow around the school, particularly during Sean’s Botany Main Lesson.

This interest in weedy edible plants led me to wonder if they could be used as a widespread food source. Weeds require pretty much zero maintenance to grow, as they appear everywhere, even in poor soil, consume very little water, and require no environmentally harmful fertilisers. In many ways, weeds are the most efficient edible plants. Not only are they low cost for humans, but they also provide a host of environmental benefits: reducing erosion, pioneering growth in a barren area to allow other plants to thrive, and binding carbon from the atmosphere into the earth, to name a few.

Despite this, in the modern day there is a generally negative perspective on plants that grow without human intention that are then labelled as harmful and “bad” plants and are subsequently sprayed with strong poisons. My research aims to instead explore how plants which are commonly considered weeds can bring a variety of benefits. This led me to my question:

While researching my topic I have found many interesting new things that I was not aware of. One that stood out to me particularly is that many plants that are today considered harmful pesty weeds, used to be respected as a source of food or medicine. For example, the common dandelion is currently considered an annoying pesty weed across North America, but the reason the plants spread so much in the first place was because European settlers planted them outside their homesteads as a source of both food and medicine. It is only in more recent times that the benefits of many “weeds” have been forgotten, and they are now seen as bad plants.

One of the major benefits of weeds I have come across in my research is their nutritional value.  Weeds often contain several times more vitamins and minerals than commercially grown crops. This is largely because supermarket crops have been bred to be mass-produced while also having a mild taste, and in order to grow these traits the nutritional value of the food is sacrificed. Because of this, micronutrient deficiency is common in most people living in modern civilisation. Weeds can help counteract this because they remain dense in micronutrients due to not being selectively bred.

Of course, one of the major drawbacks of weeds as a food source is that people generally do not see them as edible, and certainly not as a food they want to eat. I want to show people that they can be not only a healthy food source but also one that tastes just as good as other vegetables.

For my practical component I intend to develop my own recipes containing edible weeds, compile them into a recipe book, and perhaps teach a workshop on how to identify, obtain, and prepare edible weeds as a food source. I’m hoping that my practical and project in general can help people see weeds, not as just annoying pests, but rather as underutilised plants with potential for benefits in many areas, including nutrition.

I have mostly focused on the edible side of things in my topic so far (as is my nature) but in the future I also intend to look at uses of weeds medicinally and as a way to create more sustainable agriculture systems.

I still have plenty of room to improve and develop my understanding of my topic and I look forward to the knowledge and skills I hope to get out of the coming months.