Faculty In Focus English

Connecting and empowering through language and story

Over the last six months, Wilderness School has encouraged and supported each academic faculty in undergoing a renewal of their curriculum.

This process has involved reimagining our faculty’s purpose, vision and creating an Essence Statement - an articulation of the faculty’s identity and mission. This has led to faculties creating their own set of learning requirements, which explain the educational entitlement of each student within the context of the subject area, and performance standards, which are used to assess and provide feedback to students on their learning and growth. In the English Faculty, we are proud of our collaboration and shared vision for English and are excited to share our ‘essence’ with the Wilderness community. At Wilderness School, our students will become connected and empowered individuals who appreciate the beauty and potency of language and recognise that stories sit at the heart of the human experience. Through engaging with a range of literary and other works and creating imaginative, analytical and reflective works of their own, they become empathic, confident young women who trust in the power of their own unique voice and feel inspired to enact positive change in the world. Students will be exposed to a range of provocative texts. Through this, we foster their bravery, challenge their assumptions and open doors to new perspectives. In this way, every Wilderness girl is enabled to learn and live creatively, independently and authentically. By sharing and appreciating stories across a range of contexts and media, we celebrate vulnerability, empathy, and recognition of the beauty and diversity of the human experience. Through engaging with the narratives of others, we teach our girls to understand themselves and their world and build relationships founded on respect. In doing so, we help to develop a student’s moral compass. We invite girls to discover and develop their personal voice as they consider and navigate their role in an ever-changing world. We teach our girls to advocate for, and enact, their beliefs, live ethically and use language to incite positive and sustainable change.

LEARNING REQUIREMENTS

At Wilderness School, English students will: • Use language with purpose in the oral, written and multimodal forms. • Analyse the relationship between ideas, context, language, audience, medium and purpose. • Appreciate the beauty and potency of language and literature. • Develop a sense of themselves as author and as responder. • Interrogate texts to develop a personal and critical response. • Analyse intertextual connections. • Reflect upon their own creative and learning processes in order to grow and learn. • Discover and develop their own unique voice and feel empowered to use it with bravery.

Head of Art, Brooke Porter, produced this artwork as part of the 2020 Year 9 Student Story Slam as an expression of the colour that stories bring to our lives.

In the English classroom, students will develop a sense of themselves as an author and as a responder.

We foster self-awareness through the lens of language and story. By developing an appreciation of the power of words and exposing girls to narratives containing perspectives and experiences beyond their own, we empower our girls to become confident in their skin. We develop their knowledge of how language can be used for specific audiences and purposes in a range of contexts so they can intentionally articulate themselves with clarity and confidence. As their responder self, students analyse, evaluate, and interrogate authors’ works in a range of modes and mediums to develop a personal and critical response. They analyse the relationship between audience, purpose, context, form and language and consider how the deliberate manipulation of language features, stylistic features and conventions create meaning. They investigate and question the dynamic relationship between author, text and responder and make connections between texts. They construct arguments about texts and ideas and demonstrate discernment in using textual evidence to support their ideas. As their authorial self, students consider carefully the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of the creative process. They consider their audience, purpose and context and make intentional decisions when manipulating form and language to impact responders in particular ways. They demonstrate courage in, and command over, their language choices and experiment with new ways to create meaning. Students reflect on their own creative process to explain, analyse, justify and critique their own authorial decisions.

Through their study of English, our girls discover and develop their own unique voice and become empowered in using it to be the best they can be throughout their life.

Leah English Head of English AUTHORIAL SELF RESPONDER SELF