Archive for category english
HSC English
For anyone wondering how Year 12 HSC students in NSW feel about high stakes external exams as a measure of their learning in English this year:
Sorry, I can’t confirm which school it came from…
(PS: Good luck studying for Paper 2 my dears!)
The shape of the Arts curriculum
Posted by kmcg2375 in education, english, social media, technology, video games on October 14, 2010
For those who have yet to check it out, the draft shape paper for the Australian Curriculum for the Arts is now available on the ACARA website.
Given that up here in Queensland the school subject ‘Media Arts’ is separate to the subject ‘English’, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to intervene in the text and see if I couldn’t just find the crossover between the two subjects.
It wasn’t hard.
2.3.3 Defining Media Arts
Media ArtsEnglish is the creative use of communications technologies to tell stories and explore concepts for diverse purposes and audiences. MediaLanguage artists represent personal, social and cultural realities using platforms such as prose fiction, poetry, dramatic performances, television, film, video, newspapers, magazines, radio,video games, the worldwide web and mobile media. Produced and received in diverse contexts, these communication forms are important sources of information, entertainment, persuasion and education and are significant cultural industries in Australian society. Digital technologies have expanded the role that mediatexts play in every Australian’s family, leisure, social, educational and working lives. Media ArtsEnglish explores the diverse artistic, creative, social and institutional factors that shape communication and contribute to the formation of identities. Through Media ArtsEnglish, individuals and groups participate in, experiment with and interpret the rich culture and communications practices that surround them.
As I spend more time in Queensland I find myself having to wrestle with my identity as an English teacher because of this overlap with Media Arts. It’s not that media texts don’t still feature in the English curriculum – they do. But the culture here is that, while student might study visual language and analyse some/increasingly visual/multimodal texts in English, it’s Media Arts you have to go to if you want to make anything serious.
On one hand, it’s like Media Arts teachers get to do a lot of the fun stuff, which kind of sucks if you’re an English teacher from New South Wales!
But on the other hand, I have to admit, compared the rigour in the Media Arts curriculum up here…well, I have to admit that as an English teacher I always seemed to run out of time to ‘do the fun stuff’ anyway (do you know how LONG it takes for students to rehearse and record their own 10 minute version of Act I of Romeo and Juliet? Fricken ages!) And it would be nice, for just a short while, not to have to feel like I am dragging my English colleagues kicking and screaming toward increased multimodal study…now if I need to find a like minded media teacher, I can just go and, well, find one.
Leaving aside the ‘are knowledge silos good or bad’ debate, what thoughts do people have about the picture I’m painting here? NSW people, if you came up to the sunshine state would you want to specialise in English, or Media Arts?
Writers on writing
Posted by kmcg2375 in books, english, random, reflections on September 28, 2010
I’m just choosing some quotes about the writing process to put into an English course book chapter on identity and storytelling. Some corkers out there! Here are a few that struck a chord with me, but which I suspect are a bit too terrifying to introduce to 7th graders 😉
- Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money. (J. P. Donleavy)
- As for me, this is my story: I worked and was tortured. You know what it means to compose? No, thank God, you do not! I believe you have never written to order, by the yard, and have never experienced that hellish torture. (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
- I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by. (Douglas Adams)
- Remarks are not literature. (Gertrude Stein)
- The misuse of language induces evil in the soul. (Socrates)
- There’s no such thing as writer’s block. That was invented by people in California who couldn’t write. (Terry Pratchett)
- Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That’s because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear. (H. P. Lovecraft)
- You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair – the sense that you can never completely put on the page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly. Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page. (Stephen King)
- Poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written, he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing. (T.S. Eliot)
So: ‘torture’, ‘evil’, ‘hack’, ‘nervousness’…’a mug’s game’. Yep, that seems about right!
Australian Children’s Literature
Posted by kmcg2375 in books, english, online tools, university on September 17, 2010
I have recently joined a team of people at QUT who are starting to develop some English teaching resources for the digital Australian Children’s Literature resource on the Austlit website.
AustLit is currently available at “almost all universities and research libraries around Australia, many municipal libraries and at some universities and research libraries internationally.”
As I started to look into the area today, I became more and more interested in the idea of exploring Australian children’s literature. I wonder how many old books are lying around out there, in Op shops or Trash and Treasure stalls, waiting to be found…and collected.
I found an interesting site with a bibliography of Australian childrens’ literature authors. When you click on the names of the listed authors and illustrators, images of their work are often displayed, and these are fascinating. They make me want to read some books like this one by Pixie O’Harris:
Next time I am at my Nan’s I’m going to raid her bookshelf – hopefully she hasn’t thrown away the picture books she used to read to me as a kid. They will make an excellent start to my collection!
Using Appraisal Resources
Posted by kmcg2375 in english, university on September 8, 2010
In my new role at QUT I am teaching preservice teachers how to use Appraisal resources in the teaching of English. This is a new theoretical framework for me…is there anyone out there, in Queensland, Australia or otherwise, using the tools of Appraisal as a way into unpacking how texts work?
Here are a few excerpts from the teaching materials I am using:
Resources of Appraisal
- Attitude (including affect, judgement and appreciation)
- Affect (registering positive or negative feelings)
- Judgement (implicit or explicit judgements of the behaviour of people rating it positively or negatively0
- Appreciation (expressing positive or negative appreciations of the beauty or worth of people, relationships, artefacts, nature etc.)
- Graduation (gradability; using language to scale the force of meaning up and down)
- Engagement (using rhetorical devices to adopt a stance toward or commitment to the subject matter)
Questions to probe Appraisal
- What kinds of feelings or emotions are evident in the text?
- What judgements are made about human behaviour?
- What appreciations are made about appearances, relationships, places and things?
- How is language used to alter meaning; intensify or diminish (force), sharpen or soften (focus)?
- How are rhetorical techniques being used to position an audience?
(from McGuire, Ray ‘Language matters: Language, Literature and Literacy’ ETAQ Presentation)
It looks like a very exciting framework for drawing together the operational, cultural and critical elements of literacy around the unifying goal of ‘appraising’ the emotional response that a text provokes in an audience. I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this.
Interesting sites: Film and screen culture
Recently I stumbled across two sites that I found really interesting, both associated with people working with AFTRS (Australian Film Television and Radio School). I thought I would share them here.
The first is Screen Culture:
Welcome to Screenculture.net, a site for anyone interested in ideas and how they impact on our screen stories, screen production and screen industry.
Here you will find regular posts from Dr Karen Pearlman, Dr Matthew Campora and Mike Jones, the Screen Studies Department of AFTRS, Australia’s national screen school. You will also be able to access information about some of the research projects going on at AFTRS in our Graduate Certificate in Screen Culture, our Masters by Research, and from 2011, our new Graduate Certificate in Webisodes. The students in these courses blog, too, and we are collecting a blog roll of other interesting sites – let us know if you would like to link. There are four key objectives of this site:
- expanding and influencing discussion of screen culture
- representing the thinking going on in and around the AFTRS Screen Studies department
- making provocations to catalyse action
- distributing new knowledge to industry
and we welcome you to engage with all of them!
The blog post I read on screenculture.net was by Mike Jones, about Genre and Computer Games.
The second site is Cracking Yarns:
Cracking Yarns is dedicated to making moving pictures – films that make us laugh and make us cry. We strive to create – and help others create – films with broad appeal that don’t insult the intelligence. Films like Dead Poets Society, Little Miss Sunshineand Groundhog Day. That’s why the focus here, as the name suggests, is on story. The key to taking a movie audience on an emotionally satisfying journey is structure – yet it’s where 99% of screenplays falter. We’re passionate about story and we’re committed to sharing our knowledge so you get to fulfil your film-making ambitions – and the world gets to see more cracking good yarns.
The article I found interesting here, Why screenwriters should take the oral before the written, was about the importance of oral storytelling, and sharing stories e.g. screenplays aloud before writing them down.
Finally, in writing up this post and going back to Mike Jones’ blog, I have found a third site to point you to (his) and I recommend this article on Video Game Taxonomies.
Happy surfing!
Speaking and Writing
I found this excellent quote to describe the different processes of speaking and writing, and the importance of engaging in talk. Check it out:
Since talking, listening, and reading are all easier than writing, you should use them to prepare for writing. It is much harder to decide how to say something before you have said it. And it is definitely harder to decide how to say something in writing that you have never said in conversation. Talk to people about what you believe. Test your ideas in the faster, less permanent medium of speech before you try to set them down in the slower, more permanent medium of writing. Read all you can about what you want to write about, and then talk to someone about it. Remember that you will have no chance to see how people react when you are writing to them, but you do have a chance to see how they react when you are talking to them.
The full article Thinking About Writing is at http://daphne.palomar.edu/jtagg/thinkwrite.htm
This kind of explanation could be really valuable for teachers and students to discuss. It is also a great reminder about the importance of structuring class work that gives everyone an opportunity to talk meaningfully, and with purpose.
Top 10 Searches on Shmoop
The list recently released by Literature study site Shmoop.com shows the Top 10 searches on Shmoop for the 2009-2010 school year. It is an interesting read! The website explains:
The list is based on number of searches conducted on the Shmoop website by teachers and students in the past school year.
While one might think that pop culture juggernauts like Twilight and Harry Potter might crack the list, we found that the classics still dominate students’ searches.
Out of this list, in the past three years of English teaching alone, I have taught Macbeth, To Kill a Mockingbird, Frankenstein and Brave New World. Does this mean I’m on target? (you betcha I will say it does!)
The full Top 10 list:
- The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
- Macbeth, by William Shakespeare
- Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
- To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
- Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
- 1984, by George Orwell
- Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
- Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
- Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Nine Visions for Citizens and Soldiers
Official footage of students from Macquarie Fields High School reading their poetic response to Governer Lachlan Macquarie’s inaugural (1810) speech:
It is really great to finally see this footage. Sean and Natalie read so well! Well done to the entire ‘Live Poet’s Society’ at MFHS, and a big shout out to Lachlan and the Red Room Company for providing the school with this opportunity. Thanks guys!
Thinking about ‘Transmedia’ and ‘Transliteracy’
Followers of this blog will have noticed recent posts about multimodality – about what it means, and about how ‘literature’ and ‘modality’ are being framed in the draft Australian Curriculum.
This post is part sharing with you, and part bookmarking for myself. My explorations of multimodal theory have lead me to looking further into TRANSLITERACY and TRANSMEDIA.
Kate Pullinger put me onto this term initially, inviting me to take a look at the website for the Transliteracy Research Group. The group proposes this working definition for transliteracy:
Transliteracy is the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.
As well as the TRG material, Christy Dena’s PhD thesis Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments is another source that I will be looking into further:
“In the past few years there have been a number of theories emerge in media, film,television, narrative and game studies that detail the rise of what has been variously described as transmedia, cross-media and distributed phenomena. Fundamentally, the phenomenon involves the employment of multiple media platforms for expressing a fictional world.” (Dena, 2009: Abstract)
With my PhD coming to a close, these tangled notions of literacy and textuality are interesting me more and more…much reading to be done!
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