Qwiller Teaching Unit: Narrative Journalism (Australian English Curriculum V.9)

This unit introduces students to the principles and practices of narrative journalism, also known as literary journalism. This unit looks at the different types of feature articles (or discursive writing) available in print and online and explores a few of the popular topics relevant to Australian culture which features address. These different types of features include news features, informative features, personality sketches, personal experience stories, human interest feature stories, historical features, interpretative features and popularised scientific features. This unit divides features into eight genres in order to organise them into categories so as to explore their structural elements and the different approaches articles commonly take to their many and varied subjects. These genres include profiles, behind-the-news-stories, travel stories, memoir, essays, cultural commentary, investigative reporting and hybrid texts, such as marginalia. Students will explore the history or each genre as well as their language and structure features. The unit will also explore multi-media features of the genre, including different media used to deliver content, as well as narrative genres that appear in magazines and online media, for example, quizzes, horoscopes, advice columns and ‘listicles’ (writing or content in the form of a list). Students will create a short publication with at least one feature article and one narrative genre.