In the roster of the Universities Admissions Centre’s 102 HSC Category A courses—recognised for their academic rigour, depth of content, and relevance to further study—English Extension 2 is unique.
It is a ten-month, one-unit major work course, with no exam, designed for highly capable and motivated English students who have excelled in the Year 11 Advanced and Extension 1 courses, who want to go even further. English Extension 2 provides an opportunity for these students to pursue their talents and interests in the subject by exploring a range of complex literary texts and develop their creative and critical writing practices, to arrive at a new and substantial creative work.
The course represents the apogee of literary studies in NSW high schools. It’s tough and requires independence. Often the path ahead is no clearer than the next bend in the road. It involves students’ intellectual passion projects, with student choice and agency at the heart of the course. It asks students to exercise and acquire skills in research, writing, and drafting. It is a widening hermeneutic spiral of discoveries, opening outwards from initial crumbs and tidbits to glowing, hard-won realisations and epiphanies of bigger and bigger scope. The course allows students to discover aspects of themselves and the world that they would not have otherwise within the narrower bounds of other courses and their curricula, and to see the familiar in a new way.
Most of all, it is an impetus to produce a sustained piece of literary work that would not have existed were it not for their participation in the course. For some, it can even be a therapeutic tool, a means of expiating or clarifying or diagnosing something that has been niggling at them like a sore tooth.
There really is no other course like it in the world. It can be a stepping stone to doing academic work such as an honours year, thesis, or undertaking empirical work in the wider world. Students often encounter research literature not just in English, but also in anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology and other disciplines, giving them their first prolonged encounter with domains from the academy.
Students are offered creative constraints of a form delimited enough to shape their work, but open and spacious enough to be stretched, innovated upon, or hybridised into a form that suits their purpose. In print, there’s short fiction, critical response, creative nonfiction, poetry, and script, with word counts ranging between 3000 and 6000. In the sound medium, the course directs students towards considering a 15-minute podcast, in all its variegated and vibrant forms: drama, storytelling, speeches, or performance poetry. Or there’s 8 minutes of multimedia, a broad church of a form that houses everything from interactive games to clickable branching stories and short films under its roof. With all of these forms, students must compose a Reflection Statement that gives them a chance to unpack the research, thinking, and construction that went into their work.
Each year, a small, rarified NSW cohort that undertakes Extension 2. Of the 25,000 or more students who do English Advanced, there are usually a little under 1500 students across the state who complete the course. The bulk of these choose short fiction, then critical response, and in ever smaller numbers, in the double digits, for the other modes. The marking process is a difficult and rigorous one directed by a highly experienced and knowledgeable senior marking team. Marking Extension 2 is enjoyable for a range of reasons, it’s great professional development and brings you into contact with incredible young minds and their brilliant works. I left the marking centre each year with mental notes to myself about new books to read, historical figures to investigate, or theories about which to sharpen my knowledge. As well as this, it’s inherently enjoyable as a project. Unlike marking in the English Advanced modules, you’re marking essay after essay on the same question, each English Extension 2 work is a surprise.
Every year, I have been left agog at the powers of 17 and 18 year old students to offer me insights and fresh perspectives into the world. How is it that these young people can so thoroughly inhabit these minds and bodies and places? Ventriloquise these voices? Know the world and human relationships so deeply?
The course has been elevated to new heights at IGS with the involvement of our Principal, Shauna Colnan, and a fertile collaboration between us as English teachers. At IGS, there was always a strong commitment to the course. We have always been fortunate to have a robust Extension 2 cohort, and the mentoring relationships at the heart of the course were always very strong – as were our HSC academic successes. But when Shauna began teaching the course with me in 2020, she brought a raft of fantastic ideas and pedagogy, from gallery walks to Harvard case consultations, and an even more focused sense of purpose; it has showed in the exceptional achievements of our students, such as Eliot Tompkins’ inclusion in NESA’s Young Writers’ Showcase, the collection of the top-marked Extension 2 works from that year, in 2021. It has been a delight teaching with her and with Ms Bolt, the Head of English – even if it’s sometimes alarming to students when they get feedback from all three of us!
This cohort represents one of the last to undertake the course in its current, wide-ranging and liberal form. There are changes mooted for the course that will likely see the major work take on lesser requirements and be marked internally, a course of literary theory prescribed, and an HSC exam—for the HSC cohort of 2027. So I applaud and commend to you this cohort—one of the last few to produce works in the course’s current form, and the 24th since the new HSC was introduced in 2001.