‘We Can Hope'

Integrated Literacy and Project Based Learning in Year 11 VCAL’s lyric writing unit.

What a wonderful unit of work undertaken completely online. My Drama/English pre-service teacher William Hannagan has shown dedication and great skills as a teacher in training. Despite only having met the year 11 VCAL class briefly on his first (and last) day at school, he was able to create a productive and engaging classroom learning environment, transcending the constraints of teaching online to guide the students in producing together a most worthy product. He will be greatly missed by all.

Nina Rossini

The year 11 VCAL class has been working hard on writing lyrics for a new song called ‘We Can Hope’. The song is a way for them to vent their frustrations at being stuck at home, while also being a rallying cry for community spirit in these unprecedented times. 

I’m a pre-service teacher currently completing my Masters of Teaching at Melbourne University. Over the last four weeks I’ve had the pleasure of joining Nina Rossini’s VCAL literacy class where I’ve led a unit on lyric writing. 

The catalyst for this unit was the novel The Hate You Give. An arresting debut by Angie Thomas, it explores race relations and police brutality in the United States, a topic which is top of mind for many students given the events of last year. 

The reason for us choosing to explore songwriting as a creative response to this text is that the novel frequently refers to specific hip hop songs as a way of grounding its core themes. The nineties rap superstar, Tupac, becomes a cultural touchstone in the text because of the politically loaded nature of his lyrics, which still resonate to this day.

We started the unit with a seminar on Tupac’s lyrical style, which was the perfect segue into a broader discussion on the history of protest music in the United States and its association with the Civil Rights Movement. Other artists we looked at included Nina Simone and Sam Cooke. 

To help make the unit more relatable for students, we then asked them to share songs with the class that meant something to them. This spurred on some fantastic conversations about the power of music and what sort of lyrics hit home for us. 

To progress their understanding, I followed this with a lesson on lyrical conventions. Students discussed literary devices we might expect in a memorable song, including  metaphor, simile, symbolism, rhythm, rhyme, ellipsis, alliteration and assonance. We also talked about the need for songwriters to choose their words very carefully given how condensed songs are as a medium.

Having covered all the boring bits, it was time to consolidate our lyric writing knowledge through practice. And what better way to do this than writing a song together about hope, community and our frustrations with lockdown.

Students began by brainstorming ideas for the chorus, making a mind map of potential themes and key words. Next, they created a compendium of possible rhymes, which we then collaboratively crafted into a catchy four-line chorus. 

Having modelled the lyric-writing process, I then asked students to create a four line verse individually. One of the students, Ardi, summed up this process nicely, ‘after making the chorus, we started individually writing “one-liners” that would go good in a song about lockdown… then we all worked together to try to find a suitable start, middle and end to the song so that it would flow nicely.’

Once we had all the lyrics, I created a simple chord progression and set them to a melody, asking students for feedback in real time. Though this unit is about literacy, a song needs music to shine and it certainly was heartening to see the look on their faces when they saw their lyrics set to music. 

The final step was for us to work out a cover image for our new lockdown single. We asked students to sketch possible ideas, and followed up by getting them to upload images they’d found online to Padlet (an online mind-mapping application). The beautiful image you see of a diverse set of hands reaching out and touching the globe was their idea. 

What I loved about this unit is how fully it embraced the notion of project based pedagogy, which is the backbone of the VCAL curriculum. This particular teaching style encourages students to learn through collaboratively tackling a project. Because the project has a real-world outcome and entails a variety of different steps and skills, it inherently encourages engagement and often bears fruitful academic outcomes. This unit is also an example of an integrated literacy approach whereby we moved between media - the novel to the song - aiming to understand the different conventions of each, not just through analysis but also creation. Further, the discursive nature of lessons mirrored an actual group songwriting session where creators have to at once be brave and vulnerable in front of their peers (lyrics can be so personal), and also be willing to compromise to achieve a fantastic product. 

You can listen to the wonderful song the Year 11s wrote here. A complete transcript of the lyrics is below. 

 here's a link to the song on Google Drive.

We Can Hope

By the Year 11 VCAL Class.

Verse 1

Day in day out, every day and night

Goin out of my mind, goin’ out of sight

Nothing to do but eat sleep and cry 

When will it end? Corona bye bye

Lockdown got me a type of way 

Don’t even want to go out and play

I don’t feel the best 

So I stay home and rest 

Chorus: 

I  can cope, you can cope, we can cope 

I  can hope, you  can hope, we can hope.

Community coming together

Stop this lockdown forever

Verse 2

Sleeping all night  

Wake up in time  

Thinking of my community  

Trying to shine  

Lockdown got me alienated

No friends around me, so isolated 

Can’t go outside and it pisses me off

Rage inside burning, Molotov!

Chorus: 

I  can cope, you can cope, we can cope 

I  can hope, you  can hope, we can hope.

Community coming together

Stop this lockdown forever

Bridge;

No school No friends When will this end? Can’t Communicate it

It’s too complicated 

But I know this won’t be forever

We’ll get through this together.

Then we’ll do whatever

Its gonna get better

Chorus: 

I  can cope, you can cope, we can cope 

I  can hope, you can hope, we can hope.

Community coming together

Stop this lockdown forever

(Chorus repeats)