Grammar Gazette- Issue 1, 2003

GRAMMAR SCHOLARSHIP

This year we are proud to be launching the Brisbane Girls Grammar School Scholarship initiative which is being enthusiastically supported by the Old Girls Association. The School hopes to raise a principal sum by donations to enable the award of an annual Scholarship to a direct descendant of a BGGS past student on merit, who would otherwise not be able to attend the school because of their situations. We are hosting a series of launches in each state and hope that many past students, are able to attend and support this outstanding initiative. Anyone who would like further information about the scholarship fund and how they may contribute can contact Nicole Davis, Director of Marketing and Communications by telephone on 07 3332 1437 or at the following e-mail address: ndavis@bggs.qld.edu.au

EXTENDING - A NEW ADDITION TO SENIOR CURRICULUM

Their enthusiasm for the subject is shared by their teacher, Dr Robyn Colwill, who considers English Extension Literature to be the most exciting, challenging and fascinating subject that she has ever had the privilege and pleasure of teaching. Classes in the subject are taught off line, presently on Monday evenings and Thursday mornings, with a greater informality and flexibility that characterises the approaches to learning in the subject. Students share dinner each Monday evening prior to class, and engage in discussion and debate in seminar sessions designed to reflect and facilitate their transition to university, both socially and intellectually. Students also have regular access to their teacher, Dr Robyn Colwill, in individual discussion and tutorial meetings that take place outside of these scheduled morning and evening sessions. The students undertaking the subject this year have already demonstrated not only an enthusiastic intellectual engagement with the reading practices and theoretical approaches, but also the personal satisfactions that accompany

of the nature of literature, and how texts may be read as ‘literary’. All texts are negotiated and selected by the individual student for independent guided study, and students familiarise themselves with a range of traditional and contemporary literary theory, and select from and apply these theoretical understandings to their own re-reading and re-writing practices, as they conceptualise notions of ‘literariness’ in terms of how they read, rather than what they read. The twenty students undertaking the course this year are already demonstrating an impressive and sophisticated evaluation of texts from a range of theoretically informed positions for a range of audiences and purposes.

There has been an exciting new addition to the Year 12 curriculum in 2003, with the introduction of the two-semester enrichment subject, English Extension Literature, which can be studied concurrently with Senior English. The subject is designed to enable students to explore reading and writing practices and strategies, and a wide range of literary texts (canonical, contemporary, and those from popular culture, including film texts) in more complex and explicitly theoretical ways than are available in the parent subject. The subject not only offers more challenge than Senior English, but also greater autonomy and self-reflexivity in student learning and understandings about the central focus

the opportunities that the subject provides for greater independence and autonomy in their interests and approaches

to self-selected texts, self-formulated tasks, and self-focused learning.

The English Extension Task Force