We have great students who are willing to learn. We have a very supportive community of teachers, parents, and neighbors, many of whom are alumni of our district. We are a district founded on tradition that is, at the same time, starting a major renovation project that will ensure our buildings are ready for future generations of students.
However, while our infrastructure is ready for the future, our English curriculum is not.
We are looking for any opportunity to broaden our students' culture knowledge and experiences by providing them with a range of reading materials outside of our traditional English curriculum. The teachers in our department are collaborating on creating small book clubs of students who will independently read, analyze, and study authors and literature from various cultures and backgrounds. The project is aimed at not only introducing them to a wide range of voices and experiences, but allowing them to approach these works in a self-directed peer group.
While our district has a healthy textbook budget, we don't need class sets of expensive textbooks to achieve this task: rather, we just need a few copies of a selection of titles to build our own multicultural department library.
My Project
The current English 9 and English 10 curriculum at our school is very traditional literature. The texts we are hoping to receive will be used during Literature Circles projects, which are designed to be student-directed and student-selected books; the project encourages the social aspect of reading, engaging students with each other and giving them a sense of ownership over the text.
We recognize the importance of teaching modern, multicultural texts which will appeal to students and engage them in reading.
The project has been very successful in the past, and we hope to expand our current library to add texts which will inspire our students and lead to rich discussions as they read the texts together.
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