12 Essential English – Hero and Villain Pop Culture Unit – Unpacking Wonder Woman (2017)

About the PPT: A PPT designed to be used after students have viewed Wonder Woman. It begins with a warm up activity where students watch a 5-minute video which goes through visual techniques including size, salience, vector, juxtaposition, colours, gaze and symbols. I have included some key points from the video to unpack on the next few slides. This is followed by a list of Language Features and students are asked to volunteer some of the things they observed in the film which they believe were impactful. This is followed by a list of Text Structures. Students are asked which they could use to show how the hero/villain has been portrayed {they only focus on one in their speech}, and that characters VABs {values, attitudes and beliefs}. Students are prompted to discuss what VABs they noticed in the film. I have provided some answer slides with possible options (about heroes and villains in general) which students can use to help them. Students are to take notes about the VABs of both Wonder Woman and Ares as, at this point, they will not have selected which character they are going to write about. Students are asked to consider what stereotypes {cultural assumptions} are challenged/reinforced by the film. They are also asked to consider what the film’s intended reading {overall message} is.

This is followed by slides going through the Essential English criteria which have been turned into student-friendly “I can” statements. Then there is a slide explaining what is meant by evaluative language. We then looked at a negative review of the Hunger Games Prequel from Time Magazine to make a note of the author’s word choices.

Context: A lesson designed for use in a 12 Essential English classroom in Queensland, Australia as part of Unit 4: “Representations and popular culture texts.” During this unit students learned about Hero and Villain films and how filmmakers use cinematic techniques to portray them and create an intended message. Their assessment at the end of this unit was to write a 4-6 minute multimodal (speech) to be delivered live or pre-recorded reviewing one of the three films shown within the unit.

Films focused on in this particular year: Wonder Woman & Into the Spiderverse