 Have you ever asked yourself how well you know your students as individuals, how you can engage each and every student in an authentic manner? There are lots of ways to engage students in the learning process and encourage deep engagement, such as providing student choice in activities, a sense of ownership and agency, providing challenging collaborative activities and opportunities for students to connect with their immediate community and demonstrate their learning to audiences in meaningful and creative ways. Ultimately educators need to connect with students interests and prior experiences in order to increase motivation and attention. What are their interests and hobbies? What special skills and knowledge do their families possess? Have they traveled internationally? Are they involved in sports or music? For this we need to tap in to our students' family funds of knowledge that they bring to class in their virtual school bags. Psychologist Yuri Bronfenbrenner developed his theory of ecological systems, which acknowledges that humans do not develop in isolation. Our students grow in relation to the environments they encounter, family and home, school, community and society. These environments make unique impacts on a learner and Bronfenbrenner argued that human growth is encouraged when there are positive and consistent links between these environments. When families share information with teachers and vice versa, student identities are recognized, validated and incorporated into the classroom. For example, Jo Beth Allen advocates the writing and sharing of family cultural memoirs leading to closer home-school relationships. These might be, for example, oral or written family stories. Luis Moll termed the phrase funds of knowledge with reference to literacy education. Funds of knowledge are the result of people's lived experiences and social interactions. Luis Moll argues that an analysis of our students' funds of knowledge can provide a more familiar and positive view of households and can assist with negating stereotypes. Our students' cognitive and cultural knowledge provide an abundance of resources for the classroom instruction. By exploring the cultural and social worlds of our students, we can come to know them as individuals and tap into their interests for deep engagement. The students at Werana Park State School in Victoria, Australia have been given a passion project. The teachers tap into their students' interests and funds of knowledge to motivate them for deep learning. As you watch this clip, think about how the students' interests, prior experience and funds of knowledge, provide inspiration for their learning. The Enigma mission came from the students' ideas. They wanted to be able to capture something that was slightly mysterious, something that grabbed your attention. I'm out going about my business and I'm going to find the answers. An Enigma mission is a project based on deep thinking and basically you have to choose a topic and you have to research very, very deep on it and the more deep the better. Welcome to the Enigma portal. Your task as a member of an Enigma mission is to explain the great paradoxes, conundrums and mysteries of our existence. An Enigma mission is kind of like a passion project and something that the teachers will help challenge us to expand our knowledge of what happens around the world and what's in the real world out there. I chose autism as my topic because I have a relative that is autistic and at first I didn't know anything about autism and I was very interested in the topic. I chose to do my Enigma mission based on the thigh I've seen, also known as the Tasmanian tiger. Miss Vine, our teacher, she said she would pick a few students to do this project about burn integration and so we took up that challenge and we tried to do that. But the main challenge for me was DNA. I was like so interested, I mean, learning from DNA, DNA is an Enigma mission in itself. I mean, it's not a question, it's a whole Enigma mission. I interviewed people and tried to find out their understanding of autism and I contacted a scientist. I had to research about the animal and the process of bringing it back to life. I also contacted a pewing toler just named Michael Archer. Him and a group are trying to bring animals back to life. I'm not going to grow up to be a doctor but I am going to grow up to be a computer engineer. So I don't know how genes can link with that but with my genes I could like produce some sort of new like software or something. We want them to be thinkers, we want them to be people who can create change, people who can make a difference. This has changed my ideal for what I want to be when I grow up and also I want to try and say to the world that not everyone's the same pretty much. It's just because they have like different body parts and stuff like that. It doesn't mean that any different from us. I think it's given me a whole new look of autism and I think it's shown me a lot of what it's about and I think I would like to be working on autism in the future and trying to help people with autism. It's clear that the students at Warrana Park State School have an authentic connection to the topics they investigated because their teachers made a point of getting to know them as individuals and uncovering their interests and making connections with their prior experiences. I know of another student however whose skills and funds of knowledge are yet to be uncovered. Let's call him Michael. Michael is visually impaired and attends a regular school. What his teacher and friends don't know is that his whole world revolves around goalball. Do you know what goalball is? Not many people do. Goalball is a Paralympic sport for blind and visually impaired athletes that uses a ball with bells inside it. Players must wear eyeshades and listen for the sound of the ball. If there was an invitation to connect with Michael's social worlds, his love for this sport may be uncovered. How could Michael's passion for goalball be used for deep learning? A large-scale project on a topic of interest is one way to increase motivation and deep engagement. Perhaps Michael could develop a YouTube channel on the game, write a blog on the history or rules of goalball. He could undertake an analysis of Paralympic results for the sport and bring a goalball to class and teach his peers how to play. These would be considered authentic tasks that connect to Michael's world, interests and which carry meaning for him. With prior success in this area, both Michael's intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy is likely to be high. Allowing Michael to have a say in how these activities are conducted and designing the learning goals is important too. The element of meaningful student choice is also critical to students' intrinsic motivation and deep engagement in a learning episode. It's not merely the ability to choose which is motivating, but the extent to which the choices relate to the student personally in an authentic and meaningful manner which are competence enhancing and which provide options for cognitive and psychological growth. Meaningful, relevant and well-designed choices promote student autonomy, which in turn promote a sense of value and joy of learning itself. Student voice, student choice and student agency are critical factors in motivating for developing deep engagement competencies.