Literacy and the Orca

Screenshot from the documentary Blackfish

Prospective English teachers (student teachers at university) are often told that the English method can be applied to every kind of text. One of the few parts of the senior syllabus that pays lip service to this is the Craft of Writing module in Year 12, in which informative texts are mentioned as one of the genres of writing that students will explore. Strangely though, despite this being mentioned in the module descriptor, there are no informative texts in the Module C prescriptions list nor is it expected for students to interact or engage with informative texts in the HSC Examination.

So why is it there?

If we consider that the HSC Examination implies the endpoint of what a student is expected to learn (in my mind it's the only truly summative assessment in the entire course of a student's primary and secondary schooling) then the logic follows that the curriculum for each stage should be backward-mapped from here. Yes, we don't asses informative texts in the HSC Examination, but the inclusion of this idea in the module descriptor is intended to support the literacy of our students. 

There is no specific Literacy subject in Stage 6 yet literacy is an integral part of our learning. The public is fixated on it, the government is fixated on it, and the media is fixated on it. We have NAPLAN and Minimum HSC Standards and PAT Testing but all of these things exist outside of the KLAs. We're often told that literacy should be taught in all subjects (and to some degree it is) but it often falls onto the shoulders of the English subject to show leadership in relation to it because reading and writing is our area. And it is - inescapably - embedded into the content dot points of our syllabus outcomes in ways that it isn't for other KLAs. 

The point I'm making here is that we should be building the understanding of our students in regard to reading informative texts because it's a key part of literacy. Having a sophisticated understanding of informative texts and how they work isn't going to be assessed directly in the HSC Examinations but it will be assessed indirectly in the sense that this kind of understanding is of invaluable benefit to students when they undertake a range of examinations across a range of KLAs. 

Where the Orcas Come In

In Year 10 at my school we have a unit of work called 'Charity and Change' that focuses on students identifying a charitable cause and pitching their own charity for a fictional sum of funding. In preparation for their project on this, the students are currently undertaking a case study on the documentary Blackfish and the issues it examines in relating to Orca captivity. In order to contextualise this it's necessary for students to have an understanding of what Orcas are and what their historical relationship with humans has been. 

In a sociology subject it would be fine to just have students examine the information directly, however, in English it becomes harder to link something as straightforward as this to the outcomes for Stage 5, especially if you've already created an assessment task that's tied into particular outcomes (in this case, EN5-1A, EN5-2A and EN5-8D). In order to make good use of a context lesson like this it can become a case of combing through the English syllabus content dot points in order to find windows into the requisite skills that will assist students in reading this genre of text.

So, before I get to the reading skills, I wanted to first have an information sheet supports the watching of Blackfish by covering the following content:

• What an Orca is and how it operates in the wild
• What makes them 'special' in terms of their intelligence
• The relationship between Orcas and the Yuin Aboriginal people of the South-East Australian coast
• The broader relationship between Orcas and human societies
• The current ecological status of Orcas 

All of this is included in this sheet: Orca Information

Then in terms of the skills that students would be using to read the text this is where the English outcomes needed to come in. I ended up finding the following content dot points to support this:

• EN5-2A: use comprehension strategies to compare and contrast information within and between texts, identifying and analysing embedded perspectives, and evaluating supporting evidence
• EN5-8D: examine how language is used to express contemporary cultural issues
• EN5-8D: explain and analyse cultural assumptions in texts, including texts by and about Aboriginal Australians

These have been used to construct some questions that will scaffold students in gaining a greater awareness of the processes we employ when reading informative texts. These questions should redirect student focus into using particular reading skills, such as:

• The strategies used to comprehend informative texts - such as the conventions used to structure said texts
• The ability to recognise perspectives
• Identifying where evidence has been used to support an argument or point
• Looking more closely at word choices and why they've been made
• Examining the Aboriginal perspective and contrasting attitudes that relate to it

A sheet of these questions can be found here: Orca Questions

The questions are broken up paragraph by paragraph so students don't get lost in the text. As 'whole text' comprehension isn't one of the skills being taught here it therefore becomes a waste of time not to direct student attention to specific parts of the text.

Happy reading!

Some Further Reading:

Eden: Paradise and Purgatory by the Sea - my visit to the Eden Killer Whale Museum 

Killer Whales Learn to Speak Dolphin - an interesting article on the concept of dolphin 'accents' and 'dialects' 

Defenders of Wildlife: Orca - a site with a lot of information about a specific Orca population 

The History of Whaling in Twofold Bay - the curious story of 'Old Tom', the Orca that worked alongside human whalers in Eden and Boydtown