Vocational Major Literacy

VM Literacy  

Rationale

Literacy empowers students to read, write, speak and listen in different contexts. Literacy enables students to understand the different ways in which knowledge and opinion are represented and developed in texts drawn from daily life. The development of literacy in this study design is based upon applied learning principles, making strong connections between students’ lives and their learning. By engaging with a wide range of text types and content drawn from a range of local and global cultures, forms and genres, including First Nations peoples’ knowledge and voices, students learn how information can be shown through print, visual, oral, digital and multimodal representations.

Along with the literacy practices necessary for reading and interpreting texts, students must develop their capacity to respond to texts. Listening, viewing, reading, speaking and writing are developed systematically and concurrently so that students’ capacity to respond to different texts informs the creation of their own written and oral texts. A further key part of literacy in this study design is that students develop their understanding of how texts are designed to meet the demands of different audiences, purposes and contexts, including workplace, vocational and community contexts. This understanding helps students develop their own writing and oral communication so that they become confident in their use of language and their ability to comprehend, respond to and create texts for a variety of settings.

Students’ development of literate practices includes an emphasis on critical literacy so that they understand the social nature of language and how texts position readers in relation to particular ideologies.

Structure

Unit 1 

•           Area of Study 1: Literacy for personal use                             

•          Area of Study 2: Understanding and creating digital texts

Unit 2

•          Area of Study 1: Understanding issues and voices            

•         Area of Study 2: Responding to opinions

Unit 3

•         Area of Study 1: Accessing and understanding informational, organisational and procedural texts

•        Area of Study 2: Creating and responding to organisational, informational or procedural texts

Unit 4

•        Area of Study 1: Understanding and engaging with literacy for advocacy

•        Area of Study 2: Speaking to advise or to advocate

Satisfactory completion

The award of satisfactory completion for a unit is based on whether the student has demonstrated the set of outcomes specified for the unit. Teachers should use a variety of assessment tasks and tools that provide a range of opportunities for students to demonstrate the key knowledge and key skills in the outcomes for satisfactory completion.

The areas of study, including the key knowledge and key skills listed for the outcomes, should be used for course design and the development of learning activities and assessment tools. Assessment must be part of the regular teaching and learning program and should be completed mainly under teacher supervision and within a limited timeframe.

All assessment tools for Units 1, 2, 3 & 4 are school-based. Procedures for assessment of levels of achievement are a matter for school decision.

Entry

There are no prerequisites for entry to Units 1, 2 and 3. Students must undertake Unit 3 and Unit 4 as a sequence. Units 1–4 are designed to a standard equivalent to the final two years of secondary education. All VCE VM studies are benchmarked against comparable national and international curriculum. Each unit involves at least 50 hours of scheduled classroom instruction.