The new course - further updates

Tuesday 11 February 2020

Latest clarifications

In case you have not seen these, or if you have and are looking for some help unpacking them, here is a summary and some brief thoughts on some changes that have been made in the new course guide following feedback from teachers and discussions in the subject specific seminars.  All quotations are from the clarifications published in the February 2020 DP Coordinator’s notes and revisions in the new guide.  

The Higher Level essay 

It has been clarified that this essay should be in response to “a broad inquiry question rather than a narrowly focused one, and that this may require exploring aspects of an author’s work that go beyond an individual short literary text.”

 

What does this mean? 

It seems that this is a similar clarification that existed with the Text in Translation coursework on the previous course, guiding students to write an essay rather than something that resembles a commentary: this is particularly pertinent if students are writing about poetry or short stories in which case they will be expected to create an inquiry that requires them to write about more than one poem/short story

 

The definition of a work

This has been “expanded to indicate that a work, if made up by a number of texts, will contain texts from the same subcategory within a literary form.”

 

What does this mean? 

For example, a collection of an author’s essays is acceptable as a “work” of nonfiction, while a collection of essays and letters by an author is not.  

 

Texts for the HL essay

It is stated that “the possibility of an HL essay candidate using additional texts by an author of a multi-text work studied in class was included in the section corresponding to that component. It was made clear, that in these cases, at least one of the texts that make up the work explored in the HL essay should have been covered in class.”

 

What does this mean? 

For example, if you have studied a selection of short stories from a collection by an author and a student wants to write about a story by that author that has not been studied in class, then they can, as long as they are also writing about one that has been studied in class.  

 

Authors on the PRL

“it was made explicit that an author on the Prescribed reading list can be studied in any of the forms in which he or she wrote, even if those forms are not mentioned in relation to him or her on the list.”

 

What does this mean? 

This is self-explanatory we think - if the author is listed, you can study anything they have written in ant of the literary forms.