Integrating the inquiry theme Clean Water and Healthy Living has great potential in ensuring deep, meaningful, and transformative learning in a primary classroom setting. By utilising guided inquiry and arts-based exploration, students can look at this issue not only from a scientific or environmental perspective but as a very ethical and cultural one. Based on the questions that arise from the Part 1 inquiry, such as 'Where does our water come from?' and 'Who doesn't have clean water and why?' Year 5 students can undertake investigations of local and global issues relating to water access, storage, and sanitation. These questions are linked to the Australian Curriculum: Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) in the Year 5 content descriptor ACHASSK090 which deals with how human activities and settlement patterns are influenced by environmental characteristics (Australian Curriculum, 2017). The questions are open-ended and lend themselves to group investigation, making them natural elements in a guided inquiry approach with students going through exploration, reflection and action to build knowledge.
Godinho (2016) states that Kath Murdoch’s inquiry model offers a strong pedagogical framework for structuring such a unit. Stages of information gathering, analysis, creative representation, and action can be taken based on tuning in activities (e.g., talking about how water is used in the home and the community). Throughout, emphasis on student voice and agency, key pieces of effective inquiry learning, are aligned with the general capabilities of ethical understanding and critical thinking (Charteris and Thomas, 2016). Encouraging students to explore specific water issues in greater depth, such as drought in their area, pollution in rivers, and the effects of bottled water, helps to make personal relevance and emotional engagement.
To support the Australian Curriculum, the Arts, the exploration of artworks pursued in Part 2 can be meaningfully adapted. Water is Life by Cannupa Hanska Luger (2025) can be used as a resource to support critical response in the Visual Arts curriculum (ACAVAR113), where students can consider how artists use symbolism and materials to speak about environmental justice and Indigenous resistance. Holly Thomas’s digital illustration, Clean Water Saves Lives, can be used similarly to prompt students to analyse how composition and imagery are used to promote global change. Students could respond in the making strand by creating digital posters, drawings, or visual narratives reflecting their stance on water issues. Integration across disciplines is facilitated by these creative tasks, and they allow for the development of visual literacy, communication skills, and empathy.
This approach directly supports the cross-curriculum teaching priority of Sustainability through systems thinking and targeted work on future focus action. When students think about the impact on community health, education, and gender equality of gaining clean water in a community, they also organise their ideas about OI.2 (all life forms are interconnected) and OI.7 (actions for sustainability require personal and collective responsibility) (Australian Curriculum, 2017). In addition, real-world advocacy tasks (such as water-saving campaigns, presentations to school leadership, and art-based awareness displays) provide students with a direct role in a more sustainable future. This is consistent with Benito Olalla and Merino's (2019) concept of Education for Sustainability as transformative, action-oriented, and values-driven learning.
Importantly, the unit would also interface with the cross-curriculum priority, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures. Water is not just a resource to many First Nations communities, it is part of the Country, alive, spiritual, and interwoven with all living systems (Australia State of the Environment, 2021). This inclusion reinstates Indigenous ways of knowing and caring for land and water. This can be done respectfully, using Dreaming stories that reflect relationships with rivers and rain or engaging local Elders in speaking about traditional water management. Such inclusion enhances curriculum content descriptors such as ACHASSK083 and assists in building some reconciliation through education (Lowe and Yunkaporta 2024). Critically, this unit provides students with an understanding of clean water as more than just a utility but a fair resource, a source of culture, and an expression of sustainability. Students are enabled to think and feel or act through arts-based and guided inquiry pedagogy. It helps to ready them to assume thoughtfulness as an active, necessary part of a world in which water as a commodity is indeed a right and a shared obligation.
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