Chickens: Lesson 3 Arts, Yr 9-10

Making A Short Video On One Aspect of How Chickens Are Raised for Meat in Australia

The learning sequence for this activity begins by watching a short animation about meat chicken farming in Australia and increasing students’ understanding of the issues involved. Following some specific reading, students then proceed to design their own digital project on one aspect of this industry.

Time Allocation

Three lessons.

Voiceless Resources

• Video – How are Chickens Raised for Meat in Australia?
• Fact Sheet – How are Chickens Raised for Meat in Australia?
• Infographic – Chicken Meat: Where Does It Come From?
• Student worksheet – Video Comprehension Task
• Video transcript
• Animal Protection Encyclopedia

Key Inquiry Questions

• How can we engage with communications technologies and cross-disciplinary art forms to design, produce, distribute and interact with a range of print, audio, screen-based or hybrid artworks?
• How can the ‘five key concepts’ of Media Arts be used to teach others about issues in Australia?

Suggested Learning Activities

1. PRE-TEST

Discuss how short films can be used as effective tools to teach others about important social issues. Show some examples.

Explain that students will make their own one-minute educational video about an aspect of chicken meat production in Australia and share it with other students.

Animation software can be used for this task, where available, otherwise, iMovie also works well.

2. EXPLORE

• As a class, watch the short animation How are Chickens Raised for Meat in Australia? Chicken Welfare in the Meat Industry.
• As students watch the video, ask them to fill in the Video Comprehension Task Worksheet.

3. DISCUSS

In pairs, have students create a one-minute video about one of the aspects raised in the animation. Students should refer to the Fact Sheet “How are Chickens Raised for Meat in Australia? Chicken Welfare in the Meat Industry” for content to inform their videos.

Topics for student videos

1. The scale of intensive chicken farming in Australia (see Fact Sheet p.5)
2. A day in the life of a wild chicken (see Fact Sheet pp. 2, 4)
3. A day in the life of an intensively farmed chicken (see Fact Sheet pp. 9-11)
4. Chicken intelligence (see Fact Sheet p. 3)
5. The Five Freedoms of animal welfare (see Fact Sheet pp. 7-8)
6. Welfare issues in meat chicken farming (see Fact Sheet p. 12)

4. SHARE

Share completed videos with other students and school staff. Ask the class to decide how they’d best like to do this such as playing the videos on loop on a TV in the Art Department or on the school’s internal TV system or inviting a group of parents in to see the work after hours as part of a wider exhibition in the Art department. Investigate the possibility of the ‘best’ video being put up on the school’s website as an example of the work being done in The Arts.

If students are interested in sharing their videos further, teachers are welcome to email their students’ work to us for potential distribution on Voiceless social media. Alternatively, students and schools are welcome to include our hashtag #VoicelessAPE when posting their videos on their own social media.

5. REFLECT

Ask students to write a 250-word response to the video-making task and add it to their portfolios. Questions on the task such as what they found useful, challenging and educational are a good place to start.

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