Teaching Theme with Year 9

My Harvest Home by John Glover

Imagine this. It's Week 1 of Term 1, and I have a class of 25-odd Year 9 students, fresh from their triumphant journey through Year 8, ready to face a new year with a new English teacher.

I stand at the front of the room. The first topic for the year is Poetry.

Crickets chirp.

Poetry can sometimes be a bit of a hard sell when it comes to teaching 14 year-olds. And these are students I've never taught before; it's Day One, Topic One. I don't know any of these kids yet. 

The weeks start rolling by. I've decided to focus on the Indigenous perspective of Australia as seen through the lens of poetry, drawing on ideas from this text:

The students respond well to it. We learn about some techniques, how to annotate a poem, and what context is: the time, the place, the reasons a poet might write a certain poem. But a bubbling and largely unacknowledged bassline rumbles under it all: theme. So I ask, What ideas are being communicated? 

My students look at me blankly.

High school English is a curious beast for students to come to grip with. Many come along in Year 7 quite well-equipped with knowledge of grammar, sentence construction, techniques... but one thing tends to remain elusive; what is a 'theme'? Even by Year 9 a lot of students are still trying to get their heads around it.

A theme is an idea, or a concept. The terminology here, like a lot of things in teaching, can be tricky because these words are used in different ways in different contexts. 'Concept' is now being used with a very specific purpose in the English Textual Concepts framework, so it's probably best to steer clear of this term. I actually also prefer to avoid the term 'theme' because 'theme' can have specific connotations relating to grammar and music, but it's a term that's quite difficult to get away from in English due to its ubiquity. 

So I try to stick to 'idea' for the most part, though I am guilty of reverting back to theme with grades 7-9. The materials here refer to 'theme'. 

Back to the point of this blog: my Head Teacher has been liaising with Wayne Sawyer from Western Sydney University over the last 8 months as part of a research project concerning mini-lessons (a teaching phenomenon pioneered by Nancie Atwell in the U.S.), so I've taken this approach to teach theme. 

The PowerPoint presentation is just two slides. The first slide explains what a theme is, and students can make a few notes about it if you like. Then the next slide is a 1835 painting by John Glover called My Harvest Home. 

The point of using a painting in a poetry unit is to drive home the transcendent nature of a theme. I want the students to make connections between different kinds of texts with the theme as the common factor. By examining different mediums that explore the same idea, students should hopefully be able to identify this one common factor that stands out. My Harvest Home is a colonial Australian painting that taps into the pastoral myth that formed the basis of late 19th century Australian identity. Students don't need to know this, but the vision of European settlers farming in the sunshine provides a provocative counterpoint to the version of Australian history that's seen in most Aboriginal poetry. 

The second slide features a collection of questions designed to provoke student thought about the ideas that fuel this artwork. It can be discussed as a class, and then the teacher can use this discussion to come up with a class response (that's what the white rectangle is for on the slide - it's a space for a class definition).

Theme and context are tied very closely together, and I found it useful to bring things back to the over-arching ideas of the unit with a series of questions that reinforced prior knowledge about context and perspective. 

1. What kind of person do you think John Glover was? What can you guess about his context from this painting?
2. 1835 Australia... Whose point of view is missing from this text?
3. Why do you think that is?
4. Do you think this painting is a realistic depiction of 1835?
5. If this painting were a poem, what kind of words would be used? Make a list of 15 adjectives, verbs and nouns that could be used. 
6. Write that poem!

Resource:
1. PowerPoint presentation on 'Theme'