Section B
So what did you think? Easy? Hard? Everything you'd dreamed it would be? The product of your worst nightmares? Drop your thoughts below!
Some general comments: this was the very last year for Context as it's being culled and replaced with a new AOS for next year, but on the whole, these were some fairly accessible prompts. Each one had a fairly specific key concept that might've thrown some people off-balance, but boiling down the core concerns should result in a pretty straightforward essence...
Imaginative Landscape: Personal experiences can change our relationship with the landscape.
As always, the IL prompt is essentially saying 'imagination affects landscape,' though the idea of 'experiences' here would've necessitated a bit more specificity in your examples. Also, the question of how these experiences change our view of landscapes would also warrant discussion, ideally, though if you didn't touch on this aspect, you'd probably be fine. Provided you were able to do something interesting with the question of why experiences change our relationship with landscapes, this would have worked for a wide variety of evidence and ideas.
Whose Reality? Our ideas of reality are dominated by self-interest.
'Self-interest' is this year's specific concept, which might've been tricky if you were relying heavily on the Beautiful Forevers novel or Foe. Both could still have been linked, but Wag the Dog and Death of a Salesman probably had the more obvious surface-level connections. This is also a prompt that calls on you to talk about 'our ideas of reality,' which hints at notions of perspective and perception (which you could also link to the question of subjectivity, though that's an optional connection). But the most obvious part that would need unpacking is that key term 'self-interest,' and the overall implication that we affect our realities for our own benefit. That said, the fact that they've included 'dominated' here means you might consider discussing other contributing factors that work in tandem with our own self-interest in order to create or influence reality. Overall, whilst it may seem oddly specific at first, this prompt does tie in well to most of the core questions in WR, so fingers crossed it worked well with the ideas you had in mind!
Encountering Conflict: Our encounters with conflict usually cannot be avoided.
This is a very straightforward one, expression-wise. 'We can't avoid conflict' - doesn't get much simpler than that! However, if you hadn't at all considered the possibility of 'avoiding conflict' before, this might've posed a bit of a challenge. Unfortunately, the question of whether or not conflict can be avoided might've eliminated quite a few examples or bits of evidence, depending on what you had prepared. However, variations on this prompt have been kicking around for ages (and I know this has come up on practice exams in the past), so hopefully it's something you will have at the very least talked about in class or thought about at some stage this year. And as always, building out to why conflict is supposedly unavoidable would've been ideal, so you may've worked in some discussion of either the causes or the consequences of conflict here, depending on your preferences and the ideas you wanted to mention. I reckon this one was pretty fair on the whole; they've been a lot crueller with conflict in the past!
Identity and Belonging: We understand who we are when we recognise the people we belong with.
This is a bit odd on the surface; the notion of 'recognition' is a bit strange, but once you get your head around that, things get a lot easier. Like most Id&b prompts, you can turn this into a 'identity-depends-on-belonging' prompt, with a bit of an added twist in the form of 'understanding' identity and 'recognising'/being aware of where we belong. I reckon you'd probably need to broaden the definition of 'recognise' here to incorporate particular texts, but what's most important is that you engaged with the overall statement here, and hopefully that was relatively accessible for you!
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Topic: VCE English Exam - Context Discussion (Read 3774 times)