Life After The Oasis - Communicating to Inspire Action

Australian curriculum content descriptions: 

Year 9 English:

• Create imaginative, informative and persuasive texts that present a point of view and advance or illustrate arguments, including texts that integrate visual, print and/or audio features (ACELY1746)
• Review and edit students’ own and others’ texts to improve clarity and control over content, organisation, paragraphing, sentence structure, vocabulary and audio/visual features (ACELY1747)

Year 10 English:

• Create sustained texts, including texts that combine specific digital or media content, for imaginative, informative, or persuasive purposes that reflect upon challenging and complex issues (ACELY1756)
• Review, edit and refine students’ own and others’ texts for control of content, organisation, sentence structure, vocabulary, and/or visual features to achieve particular purposes and effects (ACELY1757)

Syllabus outcomes: EN5-1A, EN5-2A

General capabilities: Literacy, Ethical Understanding, Critical and Creative Thinking, Personal and social capability

Relevant parts of Year 9 achievement standards: Students understand how to use a variety of language features to create different levels of meaning. They understand how interpretations can vary by comparing their responses to texts to the responses of others. In creating texts, students demonstrate how manipulating language features and images can create innovative texts. They make presentations and contribute actively to class and group discussions, comparing and evaluating responses to ideas and issues. They edit for effect, selecting vocabulary and grammar that contribute to the precision and persuasiveness of texts and using accurate spelling and punctuation.

Relevant parts of Year 10 achievement standards: Students show how the selection of language features can achieve precision and stylistic effect. They explain different viewpoints, attitudes and perspectives through the development of cohesive and logical arguments. They develop their own style by experimenting with language features, stylistic devices, text structures and images. Students create a wide range of texts to articulate complex ideas. They make presentations and contribute actively to class and group discussions, building on others’ ideas, solving problems, justifying opinions and developing and expanding arguments. They demonstrate understanding of grammar, vary vocabulary choices for impact, and accurately use spelling and punctuation when creating and editing texts.

Unit of work: Life After The Oasis – English – Years 9 & 10

Time required:  120+ mins. This lesson could be delivered over one to two sessions

Level of teacher scaffolding: Medium – facilitate class discussion and support students in planning and delivering social action

• Student Worksheets – one copy per student
• Device capable of presenting a video to the class
• Handling Sensitive Topics And Controversial Issues Factsheet (optional)
• Homelessness Australia’s Homelessness And Young People Factsheet (printed, one per student)
• Other resources will be dependent on the action students decide to take

• Collaboration
• Communication
• Creativity
• Critical thinking
• Empathy
• Ethical understanding
• Leadership
• Problem solving
• Social skills

This resource has been adapted from ‘Teaching Social Issues Through English’ developed with the English Teachers Association NSW and the ‘Youth Homelessness Matters Resource’ developed by Janice Atkin. You can find these resources here.