Teaching Sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

15 minutes

Tune In: Activating Prior Knowledge

15 minutes

Find Out: Reasons for Mobile Phone Recycling

25 minutes

Take Action: Reasons for not recycling

5 minutes

Reflection

Learning intentions

Students will...

examine the importance of recycling mobile phones.
explore the difference between open and closed questions.
conduct interviews to collect qualitative data.

Success criteria

Students can...

describe the benefits of mobile phone recycling in their own words.
develop open-ended questions.
tally data and identify patterns.
share research findings using an effective presentation format.

Tune In: Activating prior knowledge

Step 1

Explain to students that, in this lesson, they will be exploring recycling. They will begin by participating in a 'talk and turn' routine around the three questions below (also available on the Student Worksheet). 'Talk and turn' is a strategy used to initiate a classroom discussion where all students are actively involved at once.

Explain to do the 'talk and turn' they will form pairs, then each student will take turns in speaking and listening in response to the following questions:

What is recycling?
Can you think of any reasons why recycling might be important?
What sorts of things do you think we can recycle?

With early years' students, it is good to model this with another student before they start their own 'talk and turn' time.

Step 2

Once students have had the chance to discuss their answers in their pairs, invite them to share key points with the class. Through your discussion, clarify student understanding by suggesting the following answers to the questions:

What is recycling? Suggested answer: Recycling is the process of changing (waste) materials into new products to prevent the waste of useful materials.
Can you think of any reasons why recycling might be important? Suggested answer:
- All the raw materials required to make any of the goods we use, come from resources that are finite, meaning that once they run out, you won’t be able to get them back. Recycling means we can use these items over and over again.
  
  Year 4 Differentiation – Extend your discussion of resources, focusing on the difference between renewable and non-renewable resources. You can use this Renewable and Non-renewable Resources Factsheet.
- Extracting raw materials uses more energy than recycling. Take aluminium cans, for example. Making a can from recycled materials rather than from raw materials saves 95% of the energy that is used when making the can from scratch. What about paper? Sure, we can always grow more trees to make more paper, but growing more trees requires water and energy. If trees are grown just for paper, this means less water and energy for the natural environment.
- Recycling reduces the amount of waste going to landfill. Less waste in landfill is less waste in our environment, which is better for everyone.
  What sorts of things do you think we can recycle? Suggested answers: Paper and cardboard, plastic, soft plastics, glass, aluminium (and other metals), electronic products, clothes

Through your discussion, ask students if anyone listed mobile phones (or other devices) as something that could be recycled. Explain to students that mobile phones can be recycled and should be recycled. Students will be exploring this in more detail in the rest of this lesson.

Find Out: Reasons for mobile phone recycling

Step 1

Students will now explore some of the ways that mobile phones can harm our environment, and how recycling can help. Explain that they will participate in a guided discussion around a clip: pause the clip at the timings below and use the questions and discussion points to guide class discussion at these points.

Allow students to watch the clip through once uninterrupted. You can watch it a second time pausing at the timings below to engage students in the guided discussion.

MobileMuster - The Benefits of Recycling Your Phone - (https://vimeo.com/265126147)

Suggested timings:

0:23 - What are the two big impacts of recycling mobile phones? Suggested answers:
- It keeps them out of landfill. Why is this important? A landfill site is a place where we dump our rubbish. They are pretty ugly to look at, and they can cause environmental problems. Electronic devices contain many hazardous substances that can harm people and our environment; when these devices are sent to landfill these hazardous substances can leak out and end up in the soil and in waterways.
- It reduces the need to extract new materials to make new phones. Why is this important? Keep watching!

NOTE: You could also take a moment to identify some of the materials used in the phones that are listed on the screen, such as glass, plastic and aluminium. Were any of these materials mentioned earlier (in Part A) as things you could recycle? What materials have your students heard of before? What haven't they heard of? Consider conducting research with students to identify what these materials are. This clip provides further information about some of these materials: MobileMuster - What's Inside Your Phone - https://vimeo.com/263456775.

0:40 - Were any of these materials mentioned earlier (in Part A) as things you could recycle? Suggested answer:
- Some of the things that humans need will never run out, things like water, wind and sunshine - these are called renewable resources. Of the other things we use, our Earth only has a limited amount. This means that once we've used them up there will be none left - these are called non-renewable resources. Some of the materials needed to make phones are from resources that will one day run out, meaning we won't be able to use them in the future.
1:14 - Mining can have large negative impacts on our environment, including harming plants and animals, polluting water and soil, and polluting air through greenhouse gas emissions.

Step 2

Once complete, summarise the content of this clip by asking students the following question: "Should we be recycling mobile phones? Why or why not?"

Step 3

Now pose the following question: "Given this information, do you think people are recycling their mobile phones?"

Explain to students that yes, some people are recycling their old mobile phones. However, MobileMuster suggests that there are about 25 million old mobile phones sitting in our homes that aren't being used, and whose resources are being left to waste. Only 1 in 3 people choose to recycle their mobile phones.

Remind students that this information could be useful when they come to developing ideas for their film entries for the MobileMuster Film Competition.

Why aren’t people recycling their phones? Students will explore the answer to this question in the next part of this lesson.

Take Action: Reasons for not recycling

Step 1

There are lots of different reasons why people don’t recycle their mobile phones. Display the following list of reasons for students (also available here to print and share with students):

Mobile phones aren’t recycled because people ...

are keeping old phones as spares for backup in case current phones stop working or get broken
haven't got around to recycling them yet
might have old phones that are still working or might information on them that people still need
aren’t sure what to do with them
are concerned someone might access the data

Clarify the meaning of data with students. Suggested definition: Data is information about yourself or other people that is stored on your phone. It includes things like your or other people's names, phone numbers, email addresses, home addresses, bank details and photos.

don't know where to recycle them
didn't think of recycling their phone or they forgot about it
didn't know you could recycle mobile phones
want to give it to their friends or family
are keeping the phone for their kids.

Spend some time working with students to examine all these reasons. You might like to print out the Reasons For Not Recycling Mobile Phones and put it up it somewhere the students can refer to it.

Students could address one of these reasons specifically in their film for the MobileMuster Film Competition.

Step 2

Now, explain to students that they will be interviewing their friends, family and/or teachers (who own mobile phones) to find out what they would do with their old phones.

There are two options for this process:

OPTION A. Students are given the following set of questions and will interview up to three people they know who have mobile phones. They need to record the answers to these questions in writing and bring these answers back to the class to share.

Students may also like to record the interviews using an audio or video application if they have access to a device at home. This audio/footage may come in handy if they decide to enter the MobileMuster Film Competition.

Questions for your interview:

What do you do with your old mobile phones?
What do you know about mobile phone recycling?
If you don’t recycle your old mobile phones, why not?

OPTION B. Students will develop their questioning skills by working as a class to generate the questions they would like to ask in their interviews. This will give students an opportunity to explore how asking different types of questions will affect the types of answers you get from your interviewees (e.g. closed versus open-ended questions).

Explain to students that there are generally two types of questions used in interviews:
- Open-ended questions are questions that encourage interviewees to respond to a question broadly, in some detail and in their own terms. These can be time-consuming to develop and analyse, but allow for the greatest variety of responses.
- Closed questions give interviewees a limited number of possible responses which might be provided to them or require just a yes or no answer, a one-word answer or just a number.
Try out the differences in question types using the following questions. Write the first question on the board, explaining that it is a closed question. Invite students to answer it in their workbooks:
- Closed question: Do you like school holidays?
Now write the following question on the board, explaining that it is an open-ended question that deals with the same topic but invites the person being questioned to explain their thoughts in more detail:
- Open-ended question: How would you describe your feelings about school holidays?

NOTE: Explain to students that it is generally a good idea to try to avoid closed questions in interviews unless they are followed with a request for an explanation, for example: Do you like school holidays? Why or why not?

Again, invite students to record their response to this question in their workbooks.
Once complete, invite students to engage in a class discussion around their answers to these two questions, in particular, thinking about which types of questions you might want to use in your interviews with mobile phone users.
Now students can begin thinking about what they would like to find out through their interviews, for example:
- We would like to know if our friends and families recycle their old mobile phones, and if they don’t - why.
- You can then develop some questions that can help you find out this information, for example:
  - What do you do with your old mobile phones?
  - What do you know about mobile phone recycling?
  - Why do you think mobile phone recycling might be important?
  - If you don’t recycle your old mobile phones, why not?
- Remind students that they will need to record the answers that their interviewees give in writing so it might be a good idea to limit the number of questions they ask.
As a class, students should decide on their set of questions, with each student recording these questions in their workbooks (you want all students to have the same questions so that the data you collect is based on consistent sampling). Students should then interview up to three people they know, who have mobile phones, using these questions. They need to record the answers to these questions in writing and bring these answers back to the class to share.

Step 3

Allow students time to interview up to three people about their old mobile phones.

Once complete, invite students to share the results of their interviews. Project the following table on the board and invite students to share their interview results with the class, and to classify their response in line with the reasons for not recycling old phones explored earlier. Students can add a tally mark alongside the reasons in the table:

Reason	Number (indicate with tally marks)
Already have recycled old phones!
Keeping old phones as spares for backup in case current phones stop working or get broken
Haven't got around to recycling them yet
Still use old phones that are still working or they might have information on them that people still need
Aren’t sure what to do with them
Are concerned someone might access the data
Don't know where to recycle them
Didn't think of recycling their phone or they forgot about it
Didn't know you could recycle mobile phones
Want to give it to their friends or family
Are keeping the phone for their kids

If you are planning on completing the follow-up lesson, Designing for Film - Years 3-6, keep a record of this completed table (e.g. take a photo).Step 4. Once your table is complete, work with students to talk about and analyse the results of their interviews. You could do this through class discussion using the following questions:

What is interesting or surprising about the results of your interviews?
Which are the three most common reasons for not recycling old phones? Why do you think this is?
If you were going to create a campaign to get more people to recycle their old phones, what sort of information would you provide to help them, based on the results of your interviews? (E.g. if most people are worried about the data on their old phones, you could create a campaign that tells people how to take the data off their phones easily and quickly).

Step 4

Students will now communicate the results of their data. There are two options for this process:

OPTION A. Students could work independently or in groups to create a poster or meme that:

Shares the results of their interviews
Provides information that addresses the most common response found by the class, or if working independently, the responses given by interviewees (check the MobileMuster website for further information about how to recycle mobile phones)
Includes anonymous quotes from the interviews
Includes images and supporting text (where relevant). When sourcing images, remind students that many images online are subject to copyright – students can use images from the Cool Australia Digital Library, or take their own photos, or create their own drawings.

OPTION B. Work as a class to complete this follow up lesson, Designing for Film - Years 3-6 which provides a scaffolded approach for students to create a film for the MobileMuster Film Competition that incorporates the results of the interviews undertaken in this lesson.

Learning support:

Reflection

Invite students to work independently to think about what they looked at in this lesson and complete the following:

I learned that mobile phones …
I learned that people ...
I enjoyed ...
I found it challenging to ...

Interviews on Recycling

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Summary

Lesson Guides and Printables

In this lesson