Bloom Hamner

English Department Stays a Step Ahead



Christ School's English Department hosted three professors from UNC Asheville on Tuesday.

English Department Stays a Step Ahead

Collaboration with UNCA professors helpful to department's goals

No way around it, First-Year Writing classes are a requirement for many college freshmen. Brent Kaneft wants every Christ School student and teacher under his wing to be proactive.

Kaneft chairs the English Department, which hosted three guest speakers from UNC Asheville on Tuesday, August 15. Dr. Dee James, Brian Graves, and Jessica Pisano talked about the mission and structure of their university's program. An hour-long presentation by the professors was followed by a question-and-answer session inside Stolz Hall's Bradshaw Room.

There are up to 15 professors at UNCA who teach First-Year Writing, which is a one-semester course. James, Graves, and Pisano described each of their individual approaches and some common strands emerged:

  • Fostering student awareness of context, audience, purpose, and a range of disciplinary or genre conventions
  • Fostering comfort with academic writing
  • Cultivating reading skills and strategies
  • Providing feedback through peer review
  • Fostering awareness of writing as a cyclical practice that involves drafting, reflecting and revising
  • Collaboration with university support services, including the library, writing center, media design lab, and advisers
  • Learning in context.

"Writing can be grammatically perfect and say nothing," James told the group. "You write well when you care what you're saying and it's conveyed correctly."

The goal of the presentation was to help inform the department's curriculum and goals. "Currently we work from a model we call 'Grammar Bodies', a progression in grammar, style, and MLA skills," said Kaneft.

Christ School instructors will apply what they learned to the 2017-18 school year, which begins Monday. Teachers who attended Tuesday's presentation were Brent Kaneft, Sarah Baldwin, Joe Dalton, Mary Dillon, Kyle Fraser, Cameron Hillier, Mary Jane Morrison, Emily Pulsifer, and Greg Townsend.

Asheville's Blip Studios was on hand to document the presentation. Blip works with groups to record the minutes of their meetings in a creatively-charged way with illustrations and notes.