Little+Felons

**Little Felons: Child Convicts by Melanie Guile**
**Resource Evaluation by: Lucy Arcamone** Little Felons: Child Convicts by Melanie Guile (2005) is book which can develop student learning both of the subject matter of a HSIE-based English unit, and of the grammatical and visual features of the texts it is appropriate to use in this field of learning. It is an illustrated non-fiction picture book which provides information on the Settlement of Sydney, and focuses on what life was like for child convicts travelling to and living in the Convict Settlement of Sydney.

Little Felons: Child Convicts is well-suited to a unit based around the HSIE outcome CCS2.1 which requires students to explore the process of the colonisation of Australia and consider this process and it’s consequences for groups with different perspectives (Board of Studies, 2001). Because it focuses on the lives and experiences of child convicts it has significance to the life experiences of students and will promote quality teaching of the topic (NSW DET, 2003) and promotes an understanding of the perspective of this group of people. In addition, because its focus is on child convicts, and not all groups involved in the settlement of Australia, the text contains limited information on Aboriginal Australians at the time. Because in this unit one of the literacy focuses is the use of visual and linguistic grammar to include or exclude different perspectives, it provides an opportunity to transition into discussing Indigenous perspectives and their exclusion and inclusion from historical record. Within the context of this unit, it is intended that the information which this text provides will be augmented with other information on the groups and processes involved in the early colonisation of Sydney.

This text is also highly useful for teaching about multi-modality in text. Alongside written text, it contains photographs of source material (which are essential texts in history education), paintings, and illustrations of the topics each section covers. These images are always on an eye-level angle, which functions to make the images appear as if there is no bias in the view, however the social distance is varied and in those situations where it is close, the aim of the images appears to be to promote empathy for the situation that the participants is in – communicating the negative aspects of the living conditions of orphans, although the images, like the written text, exclude the Indigenous Perspective for the majority of the information provided. As a known or familiar form of text (Healy, 2004) it provides a good starting point for discussing the multi-modal interface between images and written text (Cope & Kalantzis, 2011) before students investigate more complex interfaces between modes in other texts. The text as a whole could be classed as a series of chronologically sequenced factual descriptions, many of which contain smaller factual recounts. The social purpose of both text types could be discussed and linked to the use of past tense consistently throughout the book, as is appropriate for a factual recount, or any history text. Little Felons is also highly useful for developing topic vocabulary and lexical cohesion. It contains a glossary on the back page providing definitions of words (typed in bold) from the text, and most paragraphs and larger sections throughout the text achieve lexical cohesion through repetition of new words and synonyms. (Droga and Humphries)

REFERENCES: Board of Studies. (2001). //Human Society and It’s Environment K-6 Syllabus//. Sydney:Author.

Cope, B., & Kalantzis, M. (2011). Expanding the Scope of Literacy Pedagogy. Retrieved September 28th, 2011 from []

Department of Education and Training. (2003). //Quality Teaching in NSW Public Schools.//

Droga, L., & Humphries, S. (2003). //Grammar and Meaning: an Intorduction for Primary Teachers//. NSW: Target Texts

Guile, M. (2005). //Little Felons: Child Convicts//. Port Melbourne: Rigby Harcourt Education

Healy, A. (2004) The critical Heart of Multiliteracies: four resources, multimodal texts and classroom practice In //Text Next: new resources for literacy learning//. (pp. 19-35). Newtown, New South Wales: PETA