My teaching strategy - Once by Morris Gleitzman

In previous posts, I have considered how literacy theory and the curriculum documents support an unequivocal relationship between the modes of reading and viewing, writing and representing and speaking and listening. I now want to introduce a strategy that contextualises this relationship in teaching practice. This strategy will demonstrate how learning is supported by all three modes of communication. In this strategy, I will use the fictional text Once by Morris Gleitzman.

Picture from Penguin Books

This strategy will be used in a class of year seven students. Gleitzman’s text is suitable for year sevens because it has a bright, colourful cover, large writing and short chapters. These characteristics increase the text’s interest and appeal for younger students. Although the book deals with some difficult themes, it presents them through the eyes of a child, using simple vocabulary and sentence structure.

The text is written from the perspective of a young orphan situated in Poland in the second world war.  The boy, named Felix, believes that his parents are alive, and does not understand the behaviour of the Nazis towards Polish Jews. Written in first person, the majority of the text is internal dialogue, through which events are described. As such, it is an excellent tool for teaching students about the power of perspective and point of view. Although the class will have been reading the text over a number of weeks, this strategy is to be carried out over one or two lessons. Firstly, I will read chapter 15 of the text aloud to the students. This chapter can be accessed by the tab at the top of this blog. Reading to the students gives them the opportunity to ‘listen attentively to texts read aloud, (and later) identify main ideas and comment on the information presented’ (DoE, n.d., p. 68). Students can also follow along in their copies. Chapter 15 of Once details the capture and transportation of the main character, his close young friend and their protector by the Nazis, and their run-in with a Nazi officer. Following along as a teacher reads develops students’ knowledge of sound-symbol relationships in line with the text-decoder role of Luke and Freebody’s four resources model (as cited in Wing Jan, 2009). In order to decode the text, students must simultaneously utilise the skills of listening and reading.  This shows that learning in the classroom is a multimodal process, before the task has even begun.

The task in this strategy requires students to recreate an event from chapter 15 of the text. They must do this from the perspective of one of the other characters; the children’s protector Barney, the best friend Zelda, the Nazi officer or a bystander. After reading the chapter, I will lead a class discussion to help students with basic comprehension of the text. Given the structure and themes of this text, the key discussion question, drawn from Wing Jan (2009), is ‘What did I feel as I read?’ (p. 6). This question, which is asked from a text participant perspective, helps students to identify with the characters in the text and engage with their points of view. Again, this element of the strategy illustrates the connection between writing, speaking and listening as taking notes from the discussion will aid learning by informing the written task. When recreating the story from another perspective, students work primarily with the writing and representing strand of the curriculum. As text users, they consider the purpose and audience of their text, and select appropriate language features to create the text (Wing Jan, 2009).

This strategy illustrates the interconnectedness of the three strands of the curriculum by addressing a number of learning outcomes from each. For example, students ‘describe ways in which points of view are presented in texts’ (DoE, n.d., p. 61), ‘select language features to... portray people’ (p. 64), and ‘speak and listen through... discussions in formal and informal contexts’ (p. 68). However, it also illustrates that each of the modes of communication links up with the others to support learning. Listening and speaking in classroom discussions extends learning by enabling students to share and explore information. If students then write the information down, and use it to create new texts, this continues to support and extend learning. These texts are then read, as was the original, and the cycle of learning continues. Effective teaching strategies use all three modes to support learning. I will discuss this further in my next post when I look at the three modes in the context of teaching practice.

References:

Department of Education Tasmania (n.d.). The Tasmanian curriculum: English-literacy K-10 syllabus and support materials. Hobart, Tasmania: Author.

Gleitzman, M. (2005). Once. Camberwall, Vic: Puffin Books.

Wing Jan, L. (2009). Write ways: Modelling writing forms (3^rd ed.). South Melbourne, Vic: Oxford University Press.