Re: Aust100, Educ106, Educ261, Engl286 (1 Viewer)

[nessy_girl]

Hi guys, I was wondering if anyone can tell me anything about the following subjects? Ie how hard they are/how much reading is involved, what the final exams are like, and whether I actually need to get the textbooks??? Thanks heaps:

Aust100 - Australian Perspectives: Maps, Dreams, History (or something like that)

Educ106 - something abt a social and political history of education

Educ261 - something about computers and ICT in the classroom

Engl286 - Childrens Literature

 

[Lehrerin]

I am thinking of doing EDUC106 this first semester. Would love to know what workload it involves! Is it really heavy in terms of reading and assignments?
I will be doing teaching prac at the same time and have a choice of putting it off till next year.

 

[pointepink]

Hi,

I can tell you a bit about Engl 286. I did this unit two years ago and from what I remember, there were about two picture books and six adolescent fiction novels to read. There are also two readers you need to buy: one is small (only about 15 pages) and contains supplementary materials (a few children's poems and standard versions of fairy tales like cinderella and little red riding hood), the other is quite bulky and contains all the theoretical/critical material (about 200 pages). The second bulkier reader was actually really helpful because unlike other English areas, Children's Lit is fairly new and it's hard to find useful material.

This is a rough break down of the unit:

Week 1: Introduction to picture books (how to talk about the visual as well as verbal aspects)
Week 2: Picture books in depth (specific picture books)
Week 3: Retellings (parodies of traditional tales like Cinderella etc)
Week 4: Intertextuality
Week 5: Humour and The Carnivalesque
Week 6: Schema Theory (explains how we make sense of books by relying on word associations etc)
Week 7: Poetry
Week 8: Realist writing
Week 9: Fantasy writing
Week 10: Anime and Fantasy Writing vs Fanstasy Film
Week 11: The Bildungsroman (Stories of Development)
Week 12: Gender
Week 13don't remember)

I would at least borrow most of the text books because the exam paper is basically writing two essay responses, and while you can choose which questions to answer (there are about six questions in each section), you will probably have to compare texts and you can't write about the same books in both questions (need to read at least four different books and probably more because sometimes the question specifies the books to be discussed eg: Compare gender representation in Howl's Moving Castle with Amazing Maurice). You also have to do write two hand in essays, and do a short weekly quiz instead of class participation.

All round, I don't think the load is heavy for a second year subject and because it's children's fiction, all texts are quite quick reads and pretty accessible. On the other hand, there is a fair bit of theory about the reading process, how we make sense of texts, how texts encourage you to read in certain ways etc. I really enjoyed it, but I love both theory and variety and these are definitely advantage points of this unit.