Week 5 Term 2 - Teacher Practice: NCEA Level 1 English: Understanding Context (May 19 - May 23)

The primary focus and theme for our NCEA Level 1 English students in Term 2 "Our Stories and Our Histories (through poetry)." The primary text for our study is Tusiata Avia's 'The Savage Colonizer Book' and we are looking at three specific poems from the collection which are: 

Jacinda goes to the Pacific Forum in Tuvalu and my family colonises her house

BLM

Covid in the time of Primeminiscinda

An important part of the poetry study is understanding the context for each text. Understanding context is where our students can identify or navigate the context of each poem. Many of students struggle with understanding context and with texts that are rich and dense like Avia's, I knew that before launching into the poetry study that we had to do some groundwork around context - what it is and what it means to understanding and appreciating a text in full. In this post I will outline what I did with my NCEA Level 1 English class with 'Understanding Context.' 

UNDERSTANDING CONTEXT: A pre reading exercise 

Social, Historical, Cultural and Economic Contexts

The purpose of the pre reading exercise is to give my students the opportunity to learn and develop their own understanding of context. The premise of the pre reading exercise is focused on the study of two texts. I have used two texts in the pre reading exercise as a way to hook my students into understanding, identifying and exploring social, historical and cultural contexts. The two texts that used in this pre reading exercise are: 

Tusiata Avia's poem 'Dawn Raid Apology' (click on the image to access the poem)

The second text I used was the 2001 All Stars Tribute song 'What's Going On?' which was released in 2001. 

We went through each text and then discussed the following questions. The texts and questions we discussed are also on a document that the students worked from so that they have a record and evidence of pre reading work for understanding contexts. 

Here are the guiding questions we looked at for 'Understanding Context' for Tusiata Avia's poem and the All Start Tribute song. I used the same questions for both texts. 

1. After your first listen and/or read, write down your first thoughts/impressions of the text.
2. What clues does the text give you that tells you about the context surrounding the text?
3. Look up and Google global current events 2001(What's Going On) and 2019 local current events (Dawn Raids Apologiy) and write down the main current events (x5) that happened in 2001 and 2019.
4. Do you think that the social, cultural and historical contexts in this time period influenced and inspired the text and why?
5. What does this tell you about context?

This was a good exercise and the students were able to really delve into the context for both texts. They were particularly drawn to the Dawn Raids Apology text and the history of the Dawn Raids. I want to convert this study into a graphic organizer so that it organized and easier for the students to follow through as opposed to answering questions on a table on Google Doc.