St Cecilia’s Catholic Primary School teacher Elise Batchelor nominated for WA Community Achievement Award

A Port Hedland primary school teacher has been nominated for the 2023 WA Community Achievement Awards for her innovative program to teach her class about the world. Elise Batchelor teaches Year 2 at St Cecilia’s Catholic Primary School in Hedland and has been running her International Postcard Project for primary school students in remote WA for 12 years. Her nomination comes as a result of the program, which seeks to integrate all subjects and learning areas with lessons about the world. Ms Batchelor said she created the program to give her students a more international education. “I decided we wanted to collaborate over a project that combined every area of the curriculum in a crazy, fun and inspiring way for these young learners,” she said. “As most knew little of life beyond dusty Port Hedland, our thought was that we should all travel the world together over a term, learn about this amazing world and hopefully meet people from the world’s cultures simultaneously.” Ms Batchelor’s classes receive postcards from travellers from all over the world, with one previous class receiving as many as 450 in a semester. In the program students design a fictitious airline — the most recent one is known as the Roo Crew — have maths lessons that revolve around international currencies, are taught foreign languages and do arts based on different cultures. Each student has their own “passport” equipped with a photo and they do quizzes and other work based on international topics. Ms Batchelor said she wanted to bring the outside world into her class and now that the project had been going for a while it had taken on an additional purpose. “As the project moved into its second, third and ongoing years, it became clear to me that this was actually having an offshoot effect of connecting students to their families,” she said. “Connecting families to their friends and families on the other side of Australia or the world. And now, connecting community members in Port Hedland with other community members whose children have experienced the project and want to pay it forward for the next generation of students.” She said some previous students had now sent postcards back to the class. Ms Batchelor has more than 25 years of experience working with students from kindergarten to university.