English

At Winchester Thurston, the English curriculum empowers students with the knowledge, skills, and tools to deepen their self-awareness and to question, discover, understand, and impact the world around them.

Our curriculum begins with topic-based courses for ninth and tenth-grade students, introducing students to writers from a variety of eras and diverse backgrounds and providing them with foundational skills in composition, critical thinking, creative writing, and literary analysis. Juniors and seniors may choose from a range of more rigorous courses specific to genres of interest, from drama to film and music to rhetorical studies to literary theory and analysis. As students move through the Upper School curriculum, they become increasingly sophisticated in their mastery of the critical skills of close reading, purposeful and clear writing, engaged listening, expressive speaking, and critical and analytical thinking, and they take increasing ownership over the means and forms through which they respond to the central questions of a course, producing texts meant to be shared outwardly with communities beyond the classroom.

WT students take English all four years. In eleventh and twelfth grade, students may elect more than one English Course.

Upper School English Courses for the 2025-2026 school year:

Ninth and Tenth Grade Courses

English 9: Literature of Journeys and Discoveries
English 10: American Voices

English 9: Literature of Journeys and Discoveries

Year – 6 credits

Required for freshmen

What compels us to leave our comfort zones and explore the unknown? What are we willing to risk to obtain new knowledge or to ensure our freedom? How do we find our passions and our paths through life? How do we derive meaning from adversity? How can literature transport and transform us? In this course, students explore these questions and more. They engage in such literary study with the aim of developing their identities and skills as readers and writers. Using published pieces as mentor texts, students examine both thematic patterns as well as a piece's craft moves (diction, detail, figurative language, etc.). Students develop skills as active readers, focusing on reading as a conversation with the text. They respond to anchor texts and self-selected texts through daily reading and writing practices. Using this method, students work toward several polished pieces of writing, spanning a variety of genres (literary analysis, creative pieces, and personal essays).

English 10: American Voices

Year – 6 credits

Required for sophomores

What does it mean to be American? To what extent do Americans share a common identity? How do American authors respond to the influences of government, the natural world, race, class, and gender in their writing? How have American writers transformed what is possible with literature through innovation and experimentation with form and focus? American Voices aims to unpack the complex cultural fabric of American identity. In this course, students will study writers from a rich diversity of backgrounds in the genres of poetry, short stories, personal essays, music, novels, and drama. Students will learn to deepen their analysis of these genres through the use of literary lenses, form arguments and challenge assumptions about American identity through written work and dialogue, and add their voices to the landscape of American literature through their own creative and critical writing.

Eleventh and Twelfth Grade Courses

Song, Stage, and Screen

Year – 6 credits

Open to juniors and seniors

The human spirit seeks to express itself by any means possible. It strives to be heard in language, image, movement, rhythm, and performance. And what does the human spirit express through these means? Rage, love, defiance—the experience of a single moment or of an entire lifetime. This course will explore the expressive forms of poetry, songwriting, drama, and film and will trace the ways that these forms explore and narrate the human experience. We will ask ourselves how these forms adequately capture the nuances of a life lived. We will inquire into the powerful relationship between the form and content of language, both through close analysis of mentor texts and through practice in our own writing and performance. Through a variety of reading and writing assignments, this course will engage both the creative and the analytical sides of the student. Students will learn to evaluate and appreciate the aesthetic qualities of a work, even as they analyze its grammar, style, and effects—including literary, poetic, and visual devices. This course asks students to take initiative with several ambitious projects in each of the genres we study. This course will ask students to wrestle with questions of authentic expression, communication, and empathy in artistic creation and to share their own responses through analytical and creative writing, and on the page and on the stage.

Speculative Fiction: Understanding the Unreal

Year – 6 credits

Open to juniors and seniors

What does it take to speculate, to create your own universe, to make a story genuinely fantastical? Speculative fiction is an umbrella term for a “super genre”, or narratives that do not fully belong in the science fiction or fantasy genre. This can include steampunk, afro-futurism, dystopia, space opera, high fantasy, paranormal fantasy, and so on. This course focuses on exploring the idea of the imagined world and the art of world-building itself as a reflection of issues within our own communities. These fantastical worlds can be futuristic and technologically advanced or even work through profound social, environmental, and political transformations. Literary and cinematic works will be paired with theoretical readings that critically frame speculative and science fiction in relation to questions of gender, race, class, colonialism, bio-politics, human rights, as well as environmental and social justice. Students will compose both analytical writing as well as make their own contributions to the subgenres within the realm of speculative fiction.

Advanced Topics: Rhetoric, Composition, and the Art of Persuasion

Year – 6 credits

Open to juniors and seniors

What makes an argument effective? How can language and visual media be employed to galvanize audiences, elevate issues of importance, and inspire positive social change? This writing-intensive class, the equivalent of a first-year college English course, attempts to answer this question through the study of rhetoric--the art of persuasion. Students will explore and experiment with the rhetorical conventions of a diverse range of nonfiction texts and visual arguments, including essays, journalism and opinion pieces, advertising, humor and satire, documentary film, political speech, and other forms of public oratory and digital media. Using examples from these genres as models, students will cultivate skills in ethical argumentation and rhetorical analysis to utilize in developing original arguments that pursue lines of inquiry, convince and persuade audiences, and mediate opposing viewpoints. Students will experience a variety of assessments both written and visual, personal and research-oriented, scaffolded by the instructor and independently pursued by students themselves.

Advanced Topics: Critical Approaches to Literature and Power

Year – 6 credits

Open to juniors and seniors

This writing-intensive, college-level course takes up the relationship between literary theory and social power. Students will think about how texts reflect, endorse, challenge, and remake the hierarchies that determine who has access and agency in our world. They will read and compare the frameworks of critical theorists from various schools of thought. These theorists will help to inform students’ reading and writing about literary texts, events, and cultural objects from across the world. Overall, the course will challenge participants to articulate how identity and power intersect in literature and literacy practices, identifying a range of strategies that students can use to empower themselves and others through language. The course asks students to take initiative across several ambitious writing projects, culminating in a theory-driven article that students will workshop and revise for potential academic publication.

In This Section

English

Upper School English Courses for the 2025-2026 school year:

Ninth and Tenth Grade Courses

English 9: Literature of Journeys and Discoveries

Year – 6 credits

English 10: American Voices

Year – 6 credits

Eleventh and Twelfth Grade Courses

Song, Stage, and Screen

Year – 6 credits

Speculative Fiction: Understanding the Unreal

Year – 6 credits

Advanced Topics: Rhetoric, Composition, and the Art of Persuasion

Year – 6 credits

Advanced Topics: Critical Approaches to Literature and Power

Year – 6 credits

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