HSIE Faculty News: Welcoming New Teachers, Celebrating HSC Success, and What’s Ahead for 2025

We are very lucky to have Ms Notarangelo return to us for 2025 and we welcome Mr Linning to the faculty. They join our existing faculty of Ms Abihanna, Ms Byrne , Ms Dowling, Ms Hinchey, Mr Keane, Ms Leggett and Mr Sokias.

We achieved some excellent HSC results in 2024 and would like to congratulate the 2024 Year 12 cohort on their achievements. In particular, Society and Culture had its highest ever average course mark and 69% of students achieved in the top two bands.

50% of Legal Studies students achieved bands 5 and 6 and showed its third consecutive year of growth. 75% of Ancient History and Business Studies students achieved bands 4,5 and 6, a significant improvement on previous years. 50% of Modern History students also achieved bands 5 and 6.

Our students also achieved the first Band 6 results in Geography since the course recommenced here. You can read a small sample of a Band 6 Personal Interest Project by Sofia, from our 2024 HSC Society and Culture class below.

Sofia’s PIP:

The central focus of my PIP is the modern ramifications of a hygiene-obsessed society. How and why has hygiene evolved?  This will examine what our notions about hygiene reflect about our society, and the effects these ideas have on those subjected to them. These effects include the continuity and change within religions that shape societies' notions of cleanliness; Hygiene becomes obsessive as our parameters for existence - specifically our spiritual institutions - degrade. These are the very institutions that constructed hygiene, and thus perpetuate instability as their institutional power depletes; we attempt to assuage this instability with obsessive cleanliness, industrialising hygiene and insecurity. As hygiene acts as an implicit force, the specific hygienic parameters vary cross-culturally. Our understanding of hygiene is presumed; the failure to act in accordance with these inherent values is typically a factor of social exclusion, where restricted access to socially valued resources prompts a deficit in life chances. As society progresses, these tacit hygiene expectations become correspondingly increasingly rigid. Social conformity promotes the desire to adhere to these expectations. In continuation, the gendered division between hygiene expectations is a consequence of patriarchal capitalism, exploited by the cleanliness and self-care industries, foregrounding concepts of consumption and commodification. Social media enforces this consumption by monetising exorbitant hygiene routines as a form of proving one's femininity and appealing to a materialistic algorithm. Therefore, hygiene is functionally constructed by our values and strengthened to emulate a semblance of control as our reality becomes more uncertain.

HSIE in Stage 4 and 5

This year, we have a lot of exciting learning opportunities to look forward to. Our Stage 4 and 5 students will be studying History in Semester 1 and Geography in Semester 2. In Year 7 History, students are studying the ancient past and Ancient Rome and India. Year 8 students are learning about the Medieval World, including the Black Death and Shogunate Japan.

Our Year 9 classes are learning about the making of the modern world, including the Industrial Revolution and World War One. Year 10 students are learning about Australia’s involvement in World War Two, the changing rights and freedoms of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People and social and cultural developments in Australia from 1950.

HSIE in Stage 6

We are excited to be running Stage 6 courses in Ancient History, Business Studies, Geography Extension History, Legal Studies, Modern History and Society and Culture this year.

We’re looking forward to a great year!