Australian Human Rights Commission

5. Character profiles

Students should now be able to prepare character profiles using the information they have learned so far and the worksheet provided, which provides a series of questions that guide the students’ response. Teachers should not feel limited to these questions. This exercise can be done individually or in pairs.

Students should then choose one character profile to develop as a piece of prose writing, using the Personal stories resource as a guide. Teachers should encourage students to be creative when imagining the ‘gaps’ in each story.

Students may wish to refer to The Laws resource sheets of a particular state or territory relating to the separation of Indigenous children from their families to guide the development of their writing.

The aim of these exercises is two-fold:

• 
  to understand how characters are developed within a narrative
  
• 
  to further penetrate the issue through a character’s development.
  

By this stage, students should have some understanding of:

• 
  a character
  
• 
  characterisation in dramatic texts
  
• 
  how these social justice issues are brought out through characters.