Stage 5Unit starter

Shakespeare our contemporary?

Key questions

  • How does context shape meaning?
  • How and to what extent does unfamiliar context affect our response? What attracts/what distances us?
  • Why do some texts endure across centuries and cultures?

Outcomes

EN5-1A, EN5-2A, EN5-4B, EN5-6C, EN5-8D

Concepts

  • Context: Students understand how the complexity of their own and of other contexts shape composition and response to texts
  • Connotation, imagery and symbol: Attention to verbal, aural and visual figures can give rise to subtle and complex meanings.
  • Representation: Can reinforce or challenge existing values and ways of thinking or may attempt to reshape or augment them
  • Code & Convention: Some codes and conventions are valued more than others and that this can depend on context
  • Literary Value: Texts valued for their cultural heritage feature polysemy, ambiguity, semantic density so givingspace for a range of interpretations

Exemplar texts

  • Shakespeare: Macbeth: text + video clips of different performances and interpretations
  • Peter Moffat: Macbeth YouTube
  • Macbeth classic comics/ graphic novel. U.A. Fanthorpe: Not in our house

The processes may be taught in any order, in varying degrees or in individual lessons depending on the needs of your students. This table ensures that learning and teaching activities and opportunities for assessment are organised through the core processes for responding and composing evident in the English syllabus.

Processes / Lessons and evidence of learning
/ Understanding
Students use a range of strategies to discriminate nuanced meaning. In their responding and composing they transfer their knowledge of texts to new contexts. /
  • Close study: Scene interpretation and performance
  • Thematic study: ambition as growth and destruction
  • Imagery of blood, violence, the unnatural.

/ Engaging personally
Students' responses to and composition of texts demonstrate a personal understanding of their world based on their experience of texts and of life and their own ideas. They project an authentic voice in different types of texts. / Personal response through
  • scene interpretation and performance
  • participation in group discussion

/ Connecting
Students evaluate representations of a concept or issue by comparing them across a range of texts from different contexts, mode and media. / Comparison of interpretations through
  • performances and
  • adaptations in different modes and media focussing on close study elements.

/ Engaging Critically
Students critically analyse and evaluate the ways in which texts represent different ideas and perspectives. / Critical essay on why Macbeth has endured and how it speaks to a contemporary audience.
/ Experimenting
Students adapt conventions of genre to experiment with ideas and critical readings of texts. / Write a pitch for an adaptation for any contemporary medium.
/ Reflecting
They extend their range of reflective practices to consider how their own context influences the ways they respond, compose and learn. / Write a reflection on own responses to texts from different times and how these have developed through the unit.
/ / © New South Wales Department of Education, 2016 / Learning and Teaching Directorate