2040 - Understanding Persuasion

Australian Curriculum content description:

Year 7 English

• Understand and explain how the text structures and language features of texts become more complex in informative and persuasive texts and identify underlying structures such as taxonomies, cause and effect, and extended metaphors (ACELA1531)
• Plan, draft and publish imaginative, informative and persuasive texts, selecting aspects of subject matter and particular language, visual, and audio features to convey information and ideas (ACELY1725)

Year 8 English

• Experiment with particular language features drawn from different types of texts, including combinations of language and visual choices to create new texts (ACELT1768)
• Create imaginative, informative and persuasive texts that raise issues, report events and advance opinions, using deliberate language and textual choices, and including digital elements as appropriate (ACELY1736)

Relevant parts of Year 7 achievement standards: Students understand how text structures can influence the complexity of a text and are dependent on audience, purpose and context. They demonstrate understanding of how the choice of language features, images and vocabulary affects meaning. Students understand how the selection of a variety of language features can influence an audience. They understand how to draw on personal knowledge, textual analysis and other sources to express or challenge a point of view. They create texts showing how language features and images from other texts can be combined for effect.

Relevant parts of Year 8 achievement standards: Students understand how the selection of text structures is influenced by the selection of language mode and how this varies for different purposes and audiences. Students explain how language features, images and vocabulary are used to represent different ideas and issues in texts. Students understand how the selection of language features can be used for particular purposes and effects. They explain the effectiveness of language choices they make to influence the audience. Through combining ideas, images and language features from other texts, students show how ideas can be expressed in new ways.

Syllabus outcomes: EN4-1A, EN4-4B

General capabilities: Literacy, Critical and Creative Thinking, Personal and Social Capability

Cross-curriculum priority: Sustainability

Unit of work: 2040 – English – Years 7 to 10

Time required: 112 mins

Level of teacher scaffolding: Medium – facilitate class discussion and guide activities

To view our NZ Curriculum alignment, click here.

• Student Worksheets – one copy per student
• Device capable of presenting a video to the class, with internet access
• Persuasive Writing Presentation
• Persuasive Language Factsheet

2040 is an innovative feature documentary that looks to the future, but is vitally important NOW! Director Damon Gameau embarks on a journey to explore what the future could look like by the year 2040 if we simply embraced the best solutions already available to us to improve our planet and shifted them rapidly into the mainstream. 

In Australia: Order the Schools Version of the 2040 DVD. The Schools Version includes an educational license and is for Australian primary and secondary schools that wish to utilise the film as a learning tool or host free on-site screenings for the school community.

In New Zealand: Order the Schools Version of the 2040 DVD. The Schools Version includes an educational license and is for New Zealand primary and secondary schools that wish to utilise the film as a learning tool or host free on-site screenings for the school community.

If you are teaching in either New Zealand or Australia, you can now organise a virtual screening of the film for your class. To enquire about this option, simply email schools@whatsyour2040.com and the 2040 team will help you set this up! If you have already bought a DVD of the film and you have a ClickView account, you can email the team for permission to upload the film to your account to make it more easily accessible for your teachers and students.

Cool.org, GoodThing Productions and Regen Pictures would like to acknowledge the generous contributions of Good Pitch Australia, Shark Island Institute, Documentary Australia Foundation, The Caledonia Foundation and our philanthropic partners in the development of these teaching resources.