English Core Curriculum

In English I, students explore the theme of identity and seek to answer the essential question, “To what extent is identity fixed or influenced?” This focus provides a platform for students to develop skills as critical thinkers, readers, and writers with various texts, including short stories, poetry, novels, essays, graphic novels, and plays. Throughout the course, written assignments cover summary-and-response, personal narrative, reflection, literary analysis, and research. Students will also have opportunities to complete creative projects and make artistic connections.

In this course, students, in the fall semester, engage in an extensive study of the short story form, helping them to acquire a critical vocabulary and learn specifically about the literary elements of plot, character, setting, theme, style, tone, and point of view. The writing component focuses on literary analysis, with an emphasis on organization, structure, and thesis statement development. Regular vocabulary study is required. In the second semester, students study multiple or longer works by major authors as well as literary criticism. The writing component focuses on research, with students preparing a major documented research essay on a literary topic. Regular vocabulary study is once again required.

This course invites students to engage in what is perhaps the most necessary skill to have in today’s increasingly complex and unpredictable world: articulating a strong and well-informed argument. Students are provided ample opportunities to read, discuss, and evaluate arguments from the world around them. Viewing writing as a conversational act, students form their own arguments in response to arguments they encounter in print, other media, or in person. The primary texts introduce conversations centered around ongoing social issues and offer useful templates for such academic writing “moves” as agreeing and disagreeing, introducing and using quotations, introducing ongoing debates, and answering objections. These materials are supplemented with literary art, and an ongoing emphasis is placed on the development of analytical and interpretative skills. Students leave the course equipped to articulate their positions in various forums, from casual conversation to the formal academic research essay, and with a deeper understanding of why formulating and taking positions matters.

This is a course for students who hunger for great literary art. If philosophy teaches us how to die, as Cicero believed, then literature teaches us how to live! The literature that we'll study in the course deals with the subject of women; in this late day and age it would seem that anyone with a modestly-evolved intellect could recognize the two most salient facts with regard to this subject: first, that women are and always have been at least as smart and capable as men, and second, that they have been given nothing close to the same respect or opportunities. Literature both reflects this subjugation and contributes to it. In all-too rare instances, it offers resistance.

The works for this course offer resistance. Kate Chopin's celebrated short novel The Awakening and Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House are both seminal works in the field of Women's Studies. Memoir and diary selections from authors such as Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf will provide more seminal thinking from well-established feminist writers, while Chimamanda Adichie's We Should All be Feminists echoes this thinking in a modern vernacular. Mariama Ba’s masterful short novel So Long a Letter provides a kind of meditation on the difficulty of forging a life that stays true both to one’s professional ambitions but also to the desire for lasting, abiding love.

This course option for the second semester of English III invites students to utilize the writing skills they have garnered to-date to write about a variety of artistic genres, including but not limited to visual arts, classical music, popular music, dance, theater, film, and creative writing. Students identify the essential elements necessary for writing about each particular artistic genre through playing the role of the observer, the interviewer, the researcher, and the audience member. While students experience some canonical works as subjects, current Interlochen performances and exhibits form the bulk of subject material. As students begin to consider their place in the world, they transition from writing broadly about art to writing about their own identities as artists, garnering skills in technical writing to market themselves in their post-secondary lives. 

This course explores the conversations and experiences of African-American writers ranging from the end of the Transatlantic slave trade through the Black Arts Movement. Students will investigate each text on its own, while also considering them alongside writings that come before and after. Students will also gain an understanding of the vast history of African-American activism and writing and how this history has shaped our contemporary understanding of race in America.

This course option for the second semester of English III explores the liberating power of art for protest as well as self-expression, which in itself can be a form of protest. Students read novels (including a novel in verse), short stories, essays, and poetry. The readings are paired with examples of visual and performing arts such as music. Students are also invited to make their own artistic connections. Throughout the course, written assignments cover literary analysis, reflection, research, and creative writing. The end of the semester is reserved for drafting a college application essay.

Humanities, Social Justice, and the Arts is an interdisciplinary, humanities-style course built with the following goal at its heart: to allow students to explore issues related to social justice while honing their skills as thinkers, researchers, writers, and presenters. The course opens with an introductory unit aimed at investigating a complex and charged subject from a variety of perspectives within a range of different media. During this unit, students read a selection of print pieces (newspaper articles, poems, and academic essays), view works of visual art, listen to a selection of songs and podcasts, and watch a film. At the conclusion of this unit, students propose a research project they pursue for the duration of the course.

To complete the research project, students identify an issue tied to social justice, evaluate sources addressing the issue, synthesize the information they collect, and present an evidence-based argument on the issue. The culminating project for the course asks students to craft a persuasive creation (a video, a piece of music, a work of visual art, etc) intended to persuade an audience to accept the position the student presented in their argument paper. The goal of this project is to allow students the chance to engage in the process of social justice awareness or activism. This course is intended to let students dive deeply into important social issues while exploring the arts and practicing key skills of critical thinking and expression.

In this course, students will investigate texts which respond, adapt, comment upon, or reimagine established works from the literary canon. Students will familiarize themselves with the notion of counter-story telling, the manner by which a writer can use the scaffolding of a previously known story and reimagine a story with a new focus.

Texts may include: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, The Tempest by William Shakespeare, A Tempest by Aimé Césaire,  The Stranger by Albert Camus, The Mersault Investigation by Kamel Daoud, and Grendel by John Gardner
 

This course offers a sustained examination of texts central to the major religious traditions of the literate world—Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and their various derivations. Central to this examination are the skills and competencies crucial for reading these texts in their relevant historical, theological, critical, institutional, and anthropological contexts, namely the skills and competencies involved with research across various academic disciplines, humanities (textual studies, cultural studies, theology), the social sciences (sociology, theoretical anthropology) and the natural sciences (applied anthropology, archeology). Assessments ask students to engage in interdisciplinary projects using both the methodologies and the insights of these various disciplines to illuminate course texts. The course serves as a broad, multidisciplinary introduction to the various methods and aims of academic research. This course is a Flex-Credit course and can satisfy either an upper-level History or upper-level English requirement.

Throughout the nineteenth century and until the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century, Russian authors have been the voices of their society's most urgent concerns. This course examines the evolution of Russian authors and the lives and representative works of notable writers from both the Golden Age of Russian Literature and the era of Stalin. Attention focuses on the evolving literary aesthetic and the range of cultural and political shifts which influenced its development.

This course is designed to familiarize students with the major themes of post-World War II American authors.  The literature focuses on the experiences of representative figures in their quest for self-actualization and their rightful place in contemporary society.

Considering Shakespeare’s plays as both enduring classics of literature and living theatrical experiences, students become acquainted with the vitality, versatility, and universality of the language. Each day, students watch recorded live London productions of Shakespeare's plays in community, an experience that introduces moments of questioning, observing and interpreting. Several short articles are assigned as independent reading, to which students respond in brief essays that are often completed during class, using the sources as a lens through which to view and understand how Shakespeare’s plays are relevant to us in 2024.

This course will introduce students to European Literature in the Modern Period, which necessarily involves an ongoing discussion of both the Modern Era and Modernism in all the arts.  The required texts represent several giants of this subject area, Modernist writers whose work and influence can hardly be overstated.  Emphasis is placed on the historical context in order to understand what forces were driving this transformative era in popular culture and the arts.

This course invites students to explore the concepts present in many of the great works throughout history—concepts such as courage, virtue, love, or justice—and examine how they manifest differently in literature across time. Students engage with various genres of literature, including music, film, fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction, ultimately selecting one classic text from the Western literary canon and a contemporary counterpart to utilize for their main focus. Students learn how to approach and read complex texts and compare/contrast how these great ideas are presented in their canonical and contemporary selections. Ultimately, students become more critical thinkers, readers, and writers through their exploration, deepening their understanding of the great conversation taking place across literature and how the great ideas are at work in their own lives.

This course considers the history and development of the short story, as well as several different critical approaches to short fiction. Reading stories that are thematically connected, students analyze classics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century short fiction, and finally they explore stories that have been published within the past few years. Students hone their critical skills by reading great works of fiction by some of the world’s finest authors, and they also have opportunities to pursue the study of authors and works according to their own interests.

This course invites students to explore the insider/outsider dynamic present in various social structures and how this dynamic impacts the creation of writing, art, and film. Students engage with various genres of literature, including music, film, fiction, poetry, drama, and creative nonfiction. Students focus primarily on how literature reflects the position of the outsider, specifically in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status, in addition to how outsiders’ work is perceived by others—both insiders and outsiders alike. Throughout the course, students gain an appreciation for the complexity of any rhetorical situation by studying the nuance involved in creating what we send out into the world.

Students in this course explore the many cultures of the Middle East through the oral and written traditions of powerful storytelling in a novel and two novellas, ancient and contemporary poems, and films.  Each of the stories introduces readers to the history and geography of this region and the religious, ethnic, and economic factors that fuel long-standing conflicts. Readers form new understanding of particular cultures in and regional historical contexts. Several short essay assignments, usually completed during class, give students the opportunity to synthesize new knowledge about the Middle East as they acquire research skills.

Theatre of Disability is a course seeking to bring voices of writers with disabilities to the forefront of our narrative. Students will read work by writers with lived experience of disabilities in the many ways disabilities manifest. Throughout our explorations in this course students can expect to read new work across a variety of mediums with a special focus on new plays from the international canon. We will engage with many aspects of theatrical plays including narrative storytelling, movement work, tactile creation, and theatre of protest. This is an English course exploring and analyzing all of these aspects of plays, so everyone is welcome, regardless of previous experience in theatre on or offstage.

In this course students will read and analyze queer scripts from the contemporary canon. In addition to analyzing new texts, students can expect to play with form as they write short scenes of their own, and to embody scripts as we move through specific moments in scenework. This is an English course exploring and analyzing intent and accessibility onstage, so everyone is welcome, regardless of previous experience in theatre on or offstage.

This course will examine the history and literatures of the African Diaspora, highlighting the Black experience and its nuances across the African continent as well as the Americas and Caribbean. Students will explore the connections and influences these expansive cultures have had on global politics and literature.

Though it is true that Science Fiction is an art form that lends itself to escapism, it can also be said that many writers use the speculative and the fantastic to examine the tangible world more thoroughly. In this course, students will learn to identify the ways in which speculative elements can be used as a metaphor for contemporary social issues. Students will also explore the Science Fiction genre as an art form and a tool for liberation.

This course provides students instruction and practice in the reading, writing, and critical thinking skills required in college. Emphasis is on written assignments that require synthesis, analysis, and argument based on sources. Students who complete this course may select to earn both high school and college credit, transcripted by Indiana University and transferrable to many colleges and universities. 

This course helps students develop critical skills essential to participation in the interpretive process. Through class discussion and focused writing assignments, this course introduces the premises and motives of literary analysis and critical methods associated with historical, generic, and/or cultural concerns. Students who complete this course may select to earn both high school and college credit, transcripted by Indiana University and transferrable to many colleges and universities.