Project Based Learning (PBL)
Semester 2, 2016
English component
You will be creating a sci-fi communication back to Earth, drawing inspiration from a wide range of fiction and non-fiction texts about space exploration and colonisation.
Our English lessons will be Monday to Thursday this term. If you are absent, you are expected to catch up for homework. |
How am I being assessed?
This term focusses on the Literature strand of the Australian Curriculum: English, as students will be immersed in texts about space in order to help them produce their own well-informed text. The learning program falls into two parts: receptive mode (surveying literature about space) and the productive mode (creating your own literature). You will be assessed on evidence of the following elements of the Year 10 Achievement Standard in your inspiration booklet responses (to be submitted at appropriate checkpoints) and your communication piece (presented at the Exhibition of Learning in week 7):
Students evaluate how text structures can be used in innovative ways by different authors. Students create a wide range of texts to articulate complex ideas. Students develop their own style by experimenting with language features, stylistic devices, text structures and images. |
LEARNING PROGRAM
Part 1: Surveying literature about space
This term you will be IMMERSED in what it is like to space exploration and colonisation from the comfort of our Adelaide classroom! That's not to say that you can't venture into space yourself one day, like Andy Thomas said in a recent interview with SBS TV show The Feed:
When you think about spaceflight, Adelaide isn’t the place that springs to mind. It’s an improbable career from anyone, let alone a boy from Adelaide, but it shows what you can do if you have a dream and have the tenacity to pursue it. |
The first person in space was Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961. However, people have always been fascinated by space and this shows in the world's most ancient cultures. We will be looking at representations of the Pleiades or Seven Sisters constellation in Australian Aboriginal songlines and Greek mythology as our starting point.
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Next you will be provided with a booklet in which to record inspiration from key ideas in the texts you survey. You will note that the pages are single sided. This is so we can undo the staples and share all our ideas before you start producing your own sci-fi text.
The first five pages are allocated to a documentary and two films we will watch together:
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The last five pages in your inspiration booklets are for you to choose your own texts to survey. You should listen, read or view at least two more texts (in addition to 'Living in Space', Apollo 13 and The Martian) and you must write entries of sufficient quality on all ten pages of your booklet to pass.
To the left is a range of texts available from Ms Grant. They include:
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Part 2: Creating your communication piece
How to communicate with Earth and/or create a lasting record of a person's life in space are key features of space sci-fi. For example, Mark Watney's video log plays a key role in The Martian, while Apollo 13's most famous line is from Jim Lovell's communication back to Earth.
Your task is to create your own sustained communication piece from space. |
Scroll up to the top of this page to remind yourself about three things you are being assessed on. Key aspects include:
The format that you choose to use can mimic a fictional text you listened to, read or viewed, or be based on real life. Some examples include diaries kept in space, through to recent communication with the International Space Station (click on the photos to the right for links). What should you focus on? Sci-fi is obviously about the underlying science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), so you should include appropriate references to these. The Canadian Space Agency has a useful list of astronautical vocabulary. However, you should also focus on the idea of STEM as a human endeavour, revealing the inner thoughts and feelings of your narrator and/or the relationships and interactions with other crew and humans back on earth. You can draw inspiration from the specific themes and ideas the class recorded while we surveyed texts about living in space. We will attempt to categorise these first. As the level of effort required will vary depending on the format you choose and how ambitious you are being, you will each need to negotiate an appropriate "length" with Ms Grant to produce a "sustained" text. |