Belonging Related Materials

This post is about 5 months later than anticipated- that's always the way right? The school year just floats away from us! Oh well. It will be useful for Year 12 teachers in preparation for trials and HSC revision, as well as teaching belonging at the end of the year.

It's always a challenge to get my students sourcing appropriate and sophisticated related texts at first; being girls, their brains immediately jump to all the cliches Disney, Finding Nemo, Mean Girls. So it's a good idea to have a really good bank of resources that you can present to your class as models of GOOD related texts.

I used to ask my students to create a 'logbook', which documents the collection of related texts and their writing on it. But these days, the whole 'book' thing seems pretty out of date to me, especially since we run a highly successful 1:1 laptop program. So these days, I proudly run a paperless classroom, preferring to upload word documents and PDFs onto our Moodle Intranet for students to type straight into and file away. "But what about their handwriting? The HSC is still hand written after all!" I hear you cry. I still ask them to hand write essays, class tasks, creative writing. It's about finding the balance between convenience and skill.

Attached here is the logbook task that I have often used for both Standard and Advanced. It's got a number of tips for successful sourcing of texts as well. I also ask students to fill out a template for each text that they find, to demonstrate their understanding of the aspects of belonging present in the text and to start analysing the forms and features of the text.

While I can't publish online works which are not my own, I can give you a pretty good list to run down as suggestions! So here are my failsafe belonging related texts, some which are really well-known, others which are a bit more obscure and good to model for students. That said, contact me directly and I am happy to send you out my copy of these resources, including film study guides.

Newspaper Articles:

SMH Good Weekend 2 of Us: a great source for both Standard and Advanced students and with one published each Saturday, they are always up to date and OFTEN feature a great story on belonging!

Television:

Australian Story: Check out the ABC website for a back catalogue of episodes. Great to teach film techniques and the documentary features. Perfect for Standard and Advanced and only go for 30 minutes! I highly recommend the following titles from the past- The Highway Man, Reality Bytes, Her Terror and Her Beauty.

Films:

Gran Torino
Juno
Aquaporko!
Into The Wild
Little Miss Sunshine

Poems:

A.D Hope: Australia
Jennifer Martinello: Emily Kngwarreye
Jennifer Strauss: Migrant Woman on a Melbourne Tram
Imtiaz Dharker: minority
Eva Johnson: Spirit belong Mother
Wondimu Mekonnen: A Refugee
Anne Sexton: Unknown Girl in a Maternity Ward

Short Stories:

Helen Garner- My Hard Heart
Helen Garner: The psychological effects of wearing stripes
Tim Winton: The water was deep and it went forever down
Tim Winton: Distant Lands
Thea Astley: Coming of Age