The Poetry of Gwen Harwood Student Book offers a rich exploration of the ways texts represent individual and collective human experiences. Designed to meet the requirements of the NSW Stage 6 English Year 12 Texts and Human Experiences focus area, this resource helps students deepen their understanding of how composers use language, form, structure, imagery, and voice to represent experiences of identity, relationships, acceptance, growth, and change, and how texts can challenge assumptions and invite us to see the world differently.
Through close reading, guided analysis, thinking routines, and explicit writing instruction, students examine how Gwen Harwood’s poetry represents experiences of childhood, memory, family, love, vulnerability, ageing, grief, mortality, creativity, embodiment, and the limits of language. Particular attention is given to the connections across the prescribed poems, helping students recognise how recurring ideas, images, and experiences create a cohesive and richly interconnected poetic suite.
The prescribed poems covered in this student book include:
Across these poems, students explore the movement from childhood innocence towards knowledge, the ways memory reshapes the past, changing relationships between parents and children, the vulnerability and sustaining power of love, and the human confrontation with ageing, loss, and mortality. They also consider Harwood’s recurring use of light and darkness, flowers, water, music, nature, the body, and sensory experience to connect deeply personal moments with broader insights into human experience.
The study is complemented by carefully selected related texts and writing activities that broaden students’ perspectives and strengthen their capacity to analyse, interpret, evaluate, and compose.
Download the Table of Contents
Authors: Emily Bosco and Anthony Bosco
Format: PDF download, 149 pages
ISBN: 978 1 923140 46 2
The Poetry of Gwen Harwood Student Book offers a rich exploration of the ways texts represent individual and collective human experiences. Designed to meet the requirements of the NSW Stage 6 English Year 12 Texts and Human Experiences focus area, this resource helps students deepen their understanding of how composers use language, form, structure, imagery, and voice to represent experiences of identity, relationships, acceptance, growth, and change, and how texts can challenge assumptions and invite us to see the world differently.
Through close reading, guided analysis, thinking routines, and explicit writing instruction, students examine how Gwen Harwood’s poetry represents experiences of childhood, memory, family, love, vulnerability, ageing, grief, mortality, creativity, embodiment, and the limits of language. Particular attention is given to the connections across the prescribed poems, helping students recognise how recurring ideas, images, and experiences create a cohesive and richly interconnected poetic suite.
The prescribed poems covered in this student book include:
Across these poems, students explore the movement from childhood innocence towards knowledge, the ways memory reshapes the past, changing relationships between parents and children, the vulnerability and sustaining power of love, and the human confrontation with ageing, loss, and mortality. They also consider Harwood’s recurring use of light and darkness, flowers, water, music, nature, the body, and sensory experience to connect deeply personal moments with broader insights into human experience.
The study is complemented by carefully selected related texts and writing activities that broaden students’ perspectives and strengthen their capacity to analyse, interpret, evaluate, and compose.
Download the Table of Contents
Authors: Emily Bosco and Anthony Bosco
Format: PDF download, 149 pages
ISBN: 978 1 923140 46 2
Image 1 of 1