Program Purpose
The arts of reading, writing, speaking, listening, and reasoning are necessary to students’ development as apprentice investigators in diverse disciplines. As students practice these arts, they develop the skills in critical and imaginative thinking that are essential to IMSA’s mission of encouraging integrative thinkers and ethical leaders. More specifically, we strive to educate students in the skills of literacy in its broadest sense (reading, writing, listening, speaking, and viewing). The ultimate purpose of such literacy, as it informs both national and IMSA standards, is to enable students to pursue life’s goals, including personal enrichment and participation as literate members of our society. The IMSA English program encourages students to engage the diverse voices of literature and to develop their own voices. Students are introduced to critical, reflective, and creative thinking, to concepts that recur in and connect literature, the arts, and sciences, and to the development of understanding and fluency in multiple uses of language. The IMSA English program enables students to gain an awareness of themselves as learners and to consider the richly layered cultural contexts of their learning in other disciplines. To this end, we aspire to serve as a resource to the entire IMSA community and to engage in dialogue with other school systems in Illinois and across the nation about English curriculum development.
Current Course Offerings
- Adaptation: Literature and Film
- AI in Text / AI as Text
- Banned Books
- Creative Writing Workshop
- Digital Literary Studies (Not offered in 26-27)
- Expression and Experiment in Poetry (Not offered in 26-27)
- Gender Studies
- Graphic Novels: Image & Text
- Horror Fiction Studies
- Literary Explorations I (Core)
- Literary Explorations II (Core)
- Literary Explorations III (Core, Dual credit)
- Modern Theater
- Modern World Fiction (Dual credit)
- Satire
- Shakespeare
- Speculative Fiction Studies
- Tolkein: Language and Literature
- Victorian Fiction (Not offered in 26-27)