The drive for senior NSW students to locate and select their own related texts has diminished somewhat since the days of Belonging and Discovery. The 2019 syllabus de-emphasised it across the entire Standard and Advanced curriculum, relegating it as a single Common Module element that doesn't require external assessment (meaning there is no requirement for students to recall their related text in the HSC exam... make of that what you will!)
All that said, Extension English 1 still requires students to find some related texts for their elective module. In total, the elective module involves the study of three prescribed texts (selected from a pool of six) and two related texts - with students expected to (most likely) draw upon their knowledge of two prescribed and one related text for the HSC question.
In a 1 hour exam context, it's quite a feat to be able to tie together that many texts and tailor a response to a previously unseen essay question.
I found myself grappling with this challenge when I first picked up an Extension class a few years ago, thinking to myself:
How does one prepare Year 12 students to be adaptable while managing sophisticated and interlocking knowledge of that many texts?
A schema works. This is a way to guide students in pulling out specific textual examples from their texts. The examples are collected in connection to the module descriptor, which can be a highly effective way to organise thinking if the student is made to do it over and over again with in the following ways:
- Use the schema with multiple texts at the same time in a single lesson
- Use the schema with the same texts at different times throughout the year
My schema was developed for the Literary Homelands elective but versions could be easily made for any of the other electives. I was heavily influenced by Paul Kiem's excellent video on the Question 1 segment of the History Extension exam. I recommend watching it even if you have no connection at all to the teaching of History as it's a really valuable approach to teaching adaptable critical thinking and the synthesis of ideas at a more academic level.
Once students have used the schema a bunch of times they can then try out some paragraph or essay responses. I start them out with the instruction to come up with a thesis in response to the question (a whole other exercise) and then to tie this thesis to one of the themes in the schema. The notes the student has made on each of their texts (both prescribed and related) in relation to this specific theme can then be pulled from each schema to construct a single thematically-driven essay paragraph that ties together two, three or even four texts.
It's not the only way to do things but my students found it helpful so maybe yours will too :)
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