Kate King-Smith
IB / VCE English at Edcellent Education
Education, while an important part of student’s development and learning, has a proclivity to feel as if it has been shoved down students’ throats. Particularly in English, we place a large emphasis on the nitty-gritty details of syntax, essay structure and textual analysis while breezing past all the things that intuitively make literature and multimodal texts matter. Sadly, these things tend to also be the most fun and engaging aspects of English as a subject. My aim, as a teacher, is to encourage my students to fall in love with consuming media and literature in all its forms, just as my own teachers and mentors have taught me in the past. I want my students to learn to appreciate storytelling in all its forms from traditional written texts, to film, to plays, even to video-games. My goal for students is to allow them to grow in their practical understanding of texts within this very real world we exist in, rather than force them to limit themselves to a narrow understanding of art and artistic expression. Through this, they may learn to critically analyse and understand their texts in real-world contexts, producing long- lasting and profound memories that will help shape them into competent young adults.