American literature
American literature Online High School Course
COURSE INTRODUCTION:
American Literature Course Introduction
COURSE LENGTH:
Full Year (30 Sessions)
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
This year-long regular-level American literature course will introduce students to classic texts by American authors from the 1840s through the present day. Students will move at a relatively standard pace through the material and be assessed via frequent shorter homework assignments, in-class discussions and activities, and more challenging longer essays and creative pieces. Students interested in the course should expect a robust yet manageable experience of a number of widely read and beloved works of American literature and to create their own works of both analytical and creative literature throughout the class.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
Students will read classic texts of American literature including works by Frederick Douglass, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, and Toni Morrison.
Students will consider the question of how to define American literature and understand how this definition has changed throughout history.
Students will engage in frequent analytical, creative, and reflective writing throughout the class, building the skills of constructing complex arguments, writing clear, precise texts, supporting arguments with multiple examples of evidence, creatively applying rhetorical strategies, and thoroughly engaging with the writing process.
Students will develop as effective critical readers equipped with a range of strategies to understand and interpret authors’ arguments and creative choices.
Students will continue to hone their skills as effective in-class discussion members, balancing speaking and listening to create productive learning environments.
Students will become more complex critical thinkers excited to engage with ambiguity and assimilate multiple conflicting viewpoints regarding a question or text.
Enduring understandings:
This class will help students build the knowledge and skills central to leading productive, empathetic, engaged lives in the 21st century, through learning and then questioning the literary foundations of the designation “American literature” and seeking to fully understand the ways different authors and audiences have interpreted this term throughout history.
As students read, discuss, and write about course texts, they will frequently be asked to engage both as generous readers who fully understand authors’ points of view and as a critical audience who can question and challenge these texts and ideas.
Students will focus on the question of why reading and writing American literature matters now, how different AND similar past moments were in American history, and what the literature of the past can offer to the present.
Students will consider how our authors and texts challenge popular ideas about what it means to be American or about whose stories belong as a part of American literature.
Students will come to the understanding that literature does not simply describe personal, community, and national identities, but actively works to shape them, and will envision roles for themselves in this shaping.