The Changing Face Of The Lion King

This lesson is designed to build students’ competencies in the following skills:

• creative thinking
• critical thinking
• communication
• global citizenship

Australian Curriculum (v9.0) content description:

Year 6, English

• Students learn to examine texts including media texts that represent ideas and events, and identify how they reflect the context in which they were created (AC9E6LY01)

Relevant parts of Year 6 achievement standards: Students read, view and comprehend different texts created to inform, influence and/or engage audiences. They identify similarities and differences in how ideas are presented and developed including through characters, settings and/or events, and how texts reflect contexts. They explain how language features including literary devices, and visual features influence audiences.

NSW Syllabus outcomes:

A student

• analyses representations of ideas in literature through genre and theme that reflect perspective and context, argument and authority, and adapts these representations when creating texts (EN3-UARL-02)

General capabilities: Critical and Creative Thinking, Literacy

Cross-curriculum priority: Sustainability 

Level of teacher scaffolding: Medium - facilitate class discussion and lead students in the analysis of movie trailers. Oversee students in creating their own movie synopses.

UN SDG 15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss

• Target 15.5: Take urgent and significant action to reduce the degradation of natural habitats, halt the loss of biodiversity and, by 2020, protect and prevent the extinction of threatened species.

• device capable of sharing videos with the class
• Lion Conservation Factsheet 
• writing materials

Since Disney released The Lion King, in 1994 and the world fell in love with its story of adventure, friendship, and family on the savanna, Africa has lost half of its lions.

In 2019, Disney released the groundbreaking live-action adaptation of The Lion King and teamed up with the Wildlife Conservation Network’s Lion Recovery Fund and its partners to help bring back lions in the wild. Through this collaboration, Disney and the Wildlife Conservation Network’s Lion Recovery Fund encouraged audiences to “Protect the Pride,” urging fans and wildlife lovers around the world to participate in the conservation of lions and their habitats and help support local people who live alongside lions.

Now, five years later, with the release of Mufasa: The Lion King in theatres on December 19, Disney and the Lion Recovery Fund are teaming up again to continue efforts to Protect the Pride, celebrate successes to date, and grow hope for a future where lions and people thrive.

Find out more about how you can Protect the Pride here (disney.com.au/mufasa-the-lion-king-protect-the-pride).

Cool.org would like to extend our thanks to the Lion Recovery Fund and the Zambian Carnivore Programme (zambiacarnivores.org/programme) for their contribution of data, imagery and stories from the field to bring these resources to life. The Zambian Carnivore Programme (ZCP) is a Zambian-registered non-profit organisation dedicated to conserving large carnivores and the ecosystems they reside in through a combination of conservation science, conservation actions, and a comprehensive education and capacity-building effort. We would particularly like to thank PhD candidates Anna Kusler and Johnathan Reyes de Merkle and wish them the best of luck with their continued research.

How to Teach Sustainability with Hope

Quick summary: This course is for both primary and secondary teachers of all subjects, but especially for English, Science, Humanities and Geography teachers who are covering climate change and the cross-curriculum priority of sustainability.