Cross-Curriculum Priorities

The cross-curriculum priorities address the contemporary issues that students face in a globalised world. Teachers may find opportunities to incorporate the priorities into the teaching and learning program for Technologies. The cross-curriculum priorities are not assessed unless they are identified within the core content.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures

In the Western Australian Curriculum: Technologies, the priority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures may provide creative, engaging and diverse learning contexts for students to value and appreciate the contribution by the world's oldest continuous living cultures to past, present and emerging technologies.

In the Technologies learning area, students explore how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples' capacity for innovation is evident through the incorporation and application of a range of traditional, contemporary and emerging technologies and practices to purposefully build and/or maintain cultural, community and economic capacity. Students may apply this knowledge and understanding throughout the processes of observation, critical and creative thinking, action, experimentation and evaluation.

Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia

In the Western Australian Curriculum: Technologies, the priority of Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia provides diverse and authentic contexts to develop knowledge and understanding of technologies processes and production and related cultural, social and ethical issues. It enables students to recognise that interaction between human activity and the diverse environments of the Asia region continues to create the need for creative solutions and collaboration with others, including Australians, and has significance for the rest of the world.

Sustainability

In the Western Australian Curriculum: Technologies, the priority of sustainability provides authentic contexts for creating preferred futures. When students identify and critique a problem, need or opportunity; generate ideas or concepts; and create solutions, they give prime consideration to sustainability by anticipating and balancing economic, environmental and social impacts.

Technologies focuses on the knowledge, understanding and skills necessary to design for effective sustainability action. It recognises that actions are both individual and collective endeavours shared across local, regional and global communities and provides a basis for students to explore their own and competing viewpoints, values and interests. Understanding systems enables students to work with complexity, uncertainty and risk; make connections between disparate ideas and concepts; self-critique; and propose creative solutions that enhance sustainability.