The Syllabus – Staying Ahead of the Game

Staying ahead of the game in English is essential. This is because primarily this course is about thinking. That’s right, THINKING!

You will be presented with a range of concepts and ideas which you will have to apply to a range of texts and situations. In order to do this well, you need to allow time for learning these concepts, for reading and viewing texts and, ultimately, for thinking about how they work together.

To start this process, it is essential that you are aware of the syllabus and the course your are studying which is created from this syllabus.

The Thinker (French: Le Penseur) is a bronze sculpture by Auguste Rodin.

Think about this advice for a second. If you do not even know what the course is that you are doing, intimately, how can you do it; how can you find success within it? Look at the rationale below for example:

The English ATAR course focuses on developing students’ analytical, creative, and critical thinking and communication skills in all language modes. It encourages students to critically engage with texts from their contemporary world, with texts from the past and with texts from Australian and other cultures. Such engagement helps students develop a sense of themselves, their world and their place in it.

Through close study and wide reading, viewing and listening, students develop the ability to analyse and evaluate the purpose, stylistic qualities and conventions of texts and enjoy creating their own imaginative, interpretive, persuasive and analytical responses. The English ATAR course is designed to develop students’ facility with all types of texts and language modes and to foster an appreciation of the value of English for lifelong learning.

Students refine their skills across all language modes by engaging critically and creatively with texts. They learn to speak and write fluently in a range of contexts and to create a range of text forms. They hone their oral communication skills through discussion, debate and argument, in a range of formal and informal situations.

Activity

In your comments to this post, answer the following.

1. Take the bolded statements alone. What does it meant to critically engage with something, with an idea, a text, a thought, a representation, an issue? How is critically engaging with something different than simply engaging wth it? What do you need in order to critically engage wth something?
2. Go further; do you have a “sense of yourself”? What does this even mean? If we equate the word “sense” with the word “awareness”, then in what way/s are you “aware” of yourself? What is your “sense of the world”? What is “your sense of your place in the world”?
3. Thinking about these “senses” discussed in part 2, from where is it that they arise?