Year 8 English students this term focused on family stories, where students were invited to listen to the wisdom of a family elder and to craft, in their own words, their story. Students then became custodians of this story, drafting, writing, then performing it for their peers. They then considered who has the right to tell whose story and observed diverse and sometimes marginalised voices within a variety of texts including the picture book The Rabbits by John Marsden and Shaun Tan, which stimulated a variety of visual responses growing out of the powerful themes of this book.
Here is a sample of their Transmedia projects and commentaries.
Anne Morrison
English Learning Area Leader
Emily and I chose the theme ‘Taking Country, Land and Culture’, and included important motifs and details, with the flag being both our salient image and a symbol in our product, showing our understanding of Shaun Tan’s illustrations. We didn’t only include references from The Rabbits but also real life references. We used native plants and included Wadawurrung language to show that this is not just a storybook theme but real life events. Another aspect from the allegory that inspired us was the colour scheme. We used yellow as used in the original text, symbolising the joyfulness and energy of the numbats in the earlier stages of the text, and the monochromatic schemes of the grey of the rabbits to depict gloom and misery. We replicated the colour schemes to continue the understanding of these contradicting emotions.
Haylee F and Emily H (8BFA)
For this assignment I worked in a group of three and our focus was racism. We each created a small piece of transmedia that symbolises or represents a different aspect of racism. My aspect was racism around the world. For this topic I wanted to highlight how racism isn’t just a small problem that happens to a handful of us, it's actually a massive, global problem that happens to thousands and thousands of people every day. People don’t see half of the abuse, verbal and physical, that occurs to men, women and children day by day. We don’t see this as a big problem, but we need to see it as a big problem.
For my piece of transmedia, I decided to use quotes, facts, and graphs, to create an infographic. This infographic shows the many people that daily racism happens to, how it happens worldwide, what people are going through, and it shares a message to everyone spreading awareness. I think showing simple facts and statistics can show a bold statement and can prove a big point. Showing that there is evidence and lots of it can make someone go 'oh, maybe this is right' or 'oh, there is proof of this happening, I didn’t even realise'. The evidence in this case is showing that this is a very real thing happening in the world and it’s happening a lot.
Some other components of this infographic include many visuals, a quote, a picture from The Rabbits, and statements. The statements and quotes really help people take their time to read the statistics, take in the information, and then read something reflective and bold.
Scarlett C (8MWA)
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My transmedia task explores the loss and heartbreak of the stolen generation. We wanted to examine the devastation of the ‘last touch’ between a parent and their child through our piece.
Niamh H (8DDA)
I used glass which represents fragility, much like the bonds of these families. Next, I used two hands on opposite sides of the glass to display what the last ‘goodbye’ would look like for an elder and child who is being taken away and included names on the glass of the children who were taken by the government.