Penrith High School
Context
Penrith High School is an academic selective high school, catering for gifted and talented students. The school is committed to academic and personal excellence, and aims to develop students who are innovative thinkers, and confident and self-motivated learners who possess sound moral and ethical values.
Situated in Sydney's outer western suburbs, the school has approximately 900 students. Penrith High School has over thirty feeder primary schools, with students travelling from areas as widespread as the Blue Mountains, the Hills district, Hawkesbury and Camden in order to attend the school. Diversity is recognised, respected and celebrated at Penrith High School. 38% of students have a language background other than English, with 48 different languages being spoken at home.
Project team participants
Mark Howie, English Head Teacher and John Payne, English and visual arts teacher.
Materials developed
A unit of work and supporting teaching resources entitled "(Re)writing You". The unit is based on a socially and culturally critical approach to the teaching of personal writing. It draws on contemporary critical theory and post-structuralist understandings of language and text in order to have students understand and respond to personal writing as a representation.
Highlights of project
The opportunity it has provided for
- the teachers involved to collaboratively program and teach a challenging unit of work, which draws on an area of mutual interest students to rise to the challenge of engaging with and coming to understand sophisticated understandings of language and the way that the notion of an 'authentic' self is made problematic in contemporary critical theory. Students' understanding of themselves as individuals and as learners has been transformed in the process.
How this project has developed understanding
The project has developed our understanding of English teaching as a social and cultural practice. It has provided us with the opportunity to develop a theoretical framework for programming English, which is centred around critical literacy and the possibilities of transformation. Developing the unit has enabled us to extend our understanding of critical literacy beyond reading as a differentiated process (i.e. invited, alternative and resistant) readings, to developing a critical writing pedagogy.
Teaching the unit has enabled us to focus on such core concepts in the Quality Teaching discussion paper as problematic knowledge, higher order thinking, deep understanding and cultural knowledge.
Writing the Self program is an overview of the Stage 4 teaching and learning program: (Re)writing You: A Collective Autobiography of Growing Up
Writing the Self unit handouts, including an assessment task for the Writing the Self unit.
Appendix 1 for Writing the Self unit. Teachers are advised to read "A transformative model of programming 7-10 English" by Mark Howie before teaching the Writing the Self unit.
Student work samples. These three work samples are from Assessment Task 5.
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