T Shaped Literacy Unit 2 - Representation...

This T shaped literacy unit focused on representations in a text. Our students asked if we could do this unit as a whole class so we listened. I lead the sessions and was able to incorporate differentiation with Dianne reinforcing the learning with her groups. The only time we separated was for the introduction of the content specific vocabulary. I have discussed my word gifting strategy in an earlier post. This meant once again we were able to be creative and strengthen our own teaching styles. 

We began by introducing the vocabulary to give our tauira the resources they needed to help them unpack and make sense of the new learning. Our next step was to revisit the learning from the Characterisation unit before we built our own connections to the topic of representation by drawing on our prior knowledge and personal biases when looking at how scientists are depicted in a wide variety of texts. We then looked at well known scientists and concluded that our biases clouded our judgements.

Our topic this time was Superheroes. I chose comics as the text type and selected pre 1980 Spiderman, Superman, Batman and their female counterparts to help us compare and contrast the gender bias that was reflected a representation of the time. I chose the comics from this time as the later ones explore issues that would not be suitable for all my learners. As with my other T shaped units I chose to collate all my lessons in one DLO so that everything was easy to find and easy to access for both myself and my learners. The presentation below has the links to all teaching points, texts used, follow up tasks and student responses.

The DLOs below reflect the student responses and show their strong connections to the topic and content specific vocabulary. What they don't show however, is the rich discussions that took place as each concept was explored and unpacked.