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 (that is, 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 recreative 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 a dialogue with other school systems within Illinois and across the nation about English curriculum development.
Current Course Offerings
- Literary Explorations I
- Literary Explorations II
- Literary Explorations III
- Authors & Topics: Experiments in Poetry
- Creative Writing Workshop
- Digital Literary Studies
- Gender Studies
- Graphic Novels: Image & Text
- Modern Theater
- Modern World Fiction
- Rhetoric and Communication: Science
- Shakespeare
- Speculative Fiction Studies
- The Idea of the Individual
- Topics in World Literature: Victorian Fiction
