Carry me down

Content descriptions below link to Australian Curriculum: Literature (Unit 1).

General Capabilities are evident across the unit and include Literacy; and Critical and creative thinking; Ethical understanding; Intercultural understanding.

Opportunities to connect Hyland’s Carry Me Down and Garner’s The Children’s Bach 

Hyland’s style and preoccupations with relationships and domestic life on the brink, share some common ground with another novel in the Reading Australia 200 Project, Helen Garner’s The Children’s Bach. For this reason, you will find options allowing you to mix and match the two units, or teach them in parallel so that students might read either or both texts. For those students who might study both The Children’s Bach (AC: Literature – Unit 2) and Carry Me Down (AC: Literature – Unit 1), there is a composite assessment task, inviting students to compare and contrast the two in style and content. Please note that some adjustments may be required for Content Descriptors, depending on the path you may take if you do combine the units.

Literature Unit 1
Investigate and reflect on different ways of reading literary texts including:

the degree to which individual points of view, experiences and contexts shape responses to texts (ACELR001)

the differences between initial personal responses and more studied and complex responses (ACELR003)

how responses of readers and viewers can range from empathetic to critical. (ACELR004)
Analyse distinctive features in literary texts including:

How text structures, language features and stylistic elements shape meaning and create particular effects and nuances, for example, through allusions, paradoxes and ambiguities (ACELR005)

Different points of view represented in texts, for example, those of characters, narrators and the implied author (ACELR006)

Approaches to characterisation, for example, the inclusion of archetypal figures, authorial intrusion, the dramatisation of a character’s inner life, and the use of interior monologue (ACELR007)

Different narrative approaches, for example, eye-witness accounts, multiple narrators, the unreliable narrator and the omniscient narrator (ACELR008)
Create analytical texts:

structuring arguments and points of view using relevant textual evidence (ACELR011)

using appropriate linguistic, stylistic and critical terminology to respond to texts (ACELR012)

using stylistic features to craft and articulate points of view (ACELR013)
Create imaginative texts:

enveloping connections between real and imagined experiences (ACELR015)

drawing on knowledge and understanding of storytelling, style and the structure of texts (ACELR016)

experimenting with aspects of style and form to achieve deliberate effects (ACELR017)

reflecting on familiar and emerging literary forms for particular audiences and purposes (ACELR018)

Source for content descriptions above: Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA).