Professional Writing (LANG 354)
Professional Writing is taught each spring semester. Professional writers include those who write in the workplace (engineers, accountants, managers, computer programmers, teachers) as well as those who write as their profession (grant writers, creative writers, technical writers).
Each semester we partner with a local nonprofit to write one or more grants. Over five years, we've written $111,000 in grants and received $9,100. Spring 2013 students earned William Randolph School a Capital Planet Foundation Grant of $2,500 to maintain and expand permaculture educational programs. Spring 2015 students earned two, $800 Learning Links Grants with Community Foundation of Western North Carolina. Spring 2019 students created an interactive media site for Burton Street Community Peace Gardens (view it here). Spring 2021 students earned a $5,000 NC Humanities Council grant to support the Realities of Poverty programming with Asheville Poverty Initiative.
Professional Writing offers students a chance to research language conventions and types of writing particular to their discipline, make professional connections in their intended career, produce job materials or graduate school materials, as well as research and produce a grant for a local nonprofit. This course appeals to students in all disciplines.
Critical Inquiry and Academic Writing - Food Justice
The class offers a critical study about the intersections of poverty, racism, and education in terms of food health and access. Students practice writing for a variety of audiences, composing essays, narratives, multimodal, and persuasive texts throughout the semester. This is a service learning course, so students expand their understanding of the food life cycle through their work with on-campus gardens, crop mobs supporting community gardens, local educational food justice nonprofits (FEAST), and / or community supported agriculture projects (The Lord's Acre).
The Teaching of Writing (LANG 396)
The Teaching of Writing introduces current theories and practices of writing pedagogy to teaching licensure students. Each semester we collaborate with an emerging teacher in a local high school. Pictured above is our Spring 2019 work with Erwin High School and our Fall 2015 work with Madison County High School. UNC Asheville students read and offer written feedback on student drafts at multiple stages in the writing process, and then the students meet face to face to workshop final drafts. UNC Asheville students learn the practices of workshop teaching and using feedback as a learning tool, and the high schoolers benefit from the individual attention to their writing.
Social Justice Rhetorics (LIT 178)
Social Justice Rhetorics (a special topics course) toured the Burton Street community in order to learn the history of grassroots organizing within Black Asheville communities and to study the threats of gentrification and I26 expansion on this particular neighborhood. This course focuses explicitly on the ways language is used in "everyday" contexts to challenge status quo ways of thinking about marginalized groups. We draw from the interdisciplinary fields of rhetoric and feminist studies to locate lines of inquiry within English studies, visual rhetoric, composition, graphic design, cultural studies, social geography, advertising, art history, sociology, and others.