Curtin Sarawak acquainting rural school students with modern teaching methods

Miri – 9 March 2015 – Academics from Curtin University, Sarawak Malaysia (Curtin Sarawak) recently conducted a half-day educational and information sharing workshop with students of SMK Subis, a rural school in Batu Niah about 80 kilometres from Miri.

The workshop was conducted as part of the university’s ongoing community outreach programme supporting education and student development in local schools. A similar workshop was conducted at SMK Luar Bandar some 50 kilometres from Miri last year.

The main objective of the workshops is to expose rural school students to modern teaching methods applied at Curtin Sarawak.

English lecturers Anita Jimmie, Serina Ann Doss and David Patenaude from the Department of Culture and Language Studies in the Faculty of Business and Humanities, and information technology lecturer Kamaroizan Mohamad from the Faculty of Engineering and Science facilitated the workshop.

Anita delivered a short session on ‘Your Body Speaks – Body Language and Effective Presentations’ in which she shared tips on giving impactful presentations, such as the effective use of gestures, appropriate posture, eye contact and voice.

The students were then asked to choose a number of items from a bag and use their imagination to create ‘products’ from the items which they then had to pitch to a group of ‘consumers’. Anita assisted each group to brainstorm ideas before they were asked to give short presentations on the merits of their ‘products’.

This was followed by an interactive lecture on ‘Writing Winning Essays’ facilitated by Serina to teach the students how to gather different viewpoints about an argumentative topic.

It involved role plays in which students played different characters and their peers had to contribute points based on the viewpoint of each character. A secretary was appointed to jot the points down, following which the students were required to organise them into paragraphs according to topic sentence, supporting details and conclusion.

Patenaude gave a presentation on ‘American English Pronunciation’ which comprised a combination of lecture and interesting activities like a Syllables Pyramid Game, Pronunciation Maze, Homophone Card Match and Pronunciation Bingo.

Kamaroizan, meanwhile, gave a talk entitled ‘Introduction to Tertiary Education’, outlining various pathways SPM school leavers can take to enter Curtin Sarawak, such as its Foundation Commerce and Arts Stream or Foundation Engineering and Science Stream courses. He also spoke about the Intensive English Programme (IEP) designed to improve the general English language proficiency of students.

In a feedback session at the end of the workshop, many of the students and school staff said they enjoyed the workshop and looked forward to more being conducted at the school in the future.

Serina delivering an interactive lecture on writing winning essays.

Patenaude pointing out nuances of American English words. 

Students in discussion during one of the workshop activities.