UNC Asheville Honors Students Bring Home Top Awards

a group of students with a professorUNC Asheville Honors students Madison Sellars, Eliana Franklin, Red McClung, and Devon Gill, with Rodger Payne, chair and professor of religious studies.
November 14, 2019

UNC Asheville didn’t send the biggest group to the North Carolina Honors Association 2019 conference in Raleigh, especially compared to some of the other schools—but that didn’t stop them from bringing home the first and second place awards for their presentations.

The conference invited honors students from all UNC System schools to present their research and projects from all disciplines. Of the four students representing UNC Asheville’s honors program, two students, Red McClung and Devon Gill, were recognized as top presenters.

From the Classroom to the Courts

Gill’s project, “Court-Appointed Child Advocacy: Becoming a Guardian ad Litem,” which took second place at the conference, might not be what comes to mind when you’re thinking about a student project. Being guardian ad litem wasn’t initially on Gill’s radar as a student project, either. At first, she thought she might just job shadow for a few days, and get a better understanding of the juvenile justice system that she hopes to work in one day. But the more she learned about it, the more she knew she had to get involved.

“In North Carolina, guardians ad litem are representatives who represent a child in abuse, neglect, or dependency cases in family court,” explained Gill, who is a sophomore majoring in political science. “They are a volunteer who gathers information, interviews parents, visits the child, interviews anyone relevant to the life of the child, who can give background or insight to what has happened in that case, and they keep up with all of that information. They attend the court hearings, they write court reports based upon their findings, and they make recommendations as to what should happen moving forward in the case.”

It’s a big job, and Gill hesitated before she decided to take it on. “I didn’t know that me, a sophomore college kid, was able to be considered to do that,” she said.

“I wanted to make sure this was something I could do,” Gill explained. “I am a full-time college student, I’m an RA on campus, I’m president and vice president of multiple organizations on campus, so I wanted to make sure this was something that I could balance in the midst of all of that.”

It was.

“I decided it was something I felt like I was called to do,” she said.

And with the support of her professors, including Linda Cornett, chair of political science, Gill’s volunteer role evolved into an internship, giving her the opportunity to explore deeper into the guardian ad litem program, and earn class credit.

Being a guardian ad litem is a challenging role to fill, Gill said, and she was glad to have the opportunity to share the experience at the Honors Conference.

“I wanted everyone to leave with a little bit more knowledge as to what goes on in kids’ lives around them. Because a lot of these kids, you wouldn’t know that they’re going through something like that,” Gill said. “I felt like if I can present on something that I’m doing and I’m just some regular college student trying to get through midterms, if I can do it, I was hoping that someone else in that room might decide that that’s something they want to do.”

Defying the Discipline

Red McClung’s project, “Defying The Discipline: Finding Beauty, Power and Chaos in Writing Against the Grammatical Grain,” had a unique spin on the classic literary research project: this project looked not only at established public works, but at her own creative writing, as well.

“My project looked at writing novels in a way that challenges our expectations of what novels are,” said McClung, who is a sophomore English major with a minor in religious studies. When you’re reading a novel, for instance, you can generally expect to know when a character is speaking, or that every sentence will have a clear beginning and end. But McClung’s work examined three novels that defy those expectations: Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes; Requiem for a Dream, by Hubert Selby Jr; and her own novel-in-progress, tentatively titled House on Fire.

McClung jokingly calls Nightwood “a commitment book”—one that is difficult to read but worth the effort. “The characters contradict themselves, they go on long diatribes, but they’re beautiful,” McClung said. “They’re as close to poetry as prose can get.”

That confusion the novelist causes the readers, using the confusion of the characters, is exactly what the author was going for, McClung argues. “It pulls you into the experience of the characters,” she said.

Similarly, Requiem for a Dream pulls the reader into the experience of the characters’ heroin addiction, forcing the reader to read on and on and on as there is no punctuation, and no easy way to stop reading.

McClung is hoping to put this technique to use in her own book, which follows a woman trying to solve a mystery from her childhood. She uses and unreliable narrator, the convergence of narration and internal monologue, and the narrator’s memory mixing with current events to elevate the level of mystery for the reader.

McClung, who took home first place for her presentation, said she was pretty nervous about presenting at her first conference, but—like working your way through a complex and grammatically defiant novel—it was worth it in the end.

For more information about UNC Asheville’s Honors Program, visit https://www.unca.edu/academics/honors-program.

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