Like many of the college literature courses that our AP course will prepare students to succeed in or place out of, Literature and Social History makes literature interdisciplinary with social history. This full-year AP Literature course requires students to work with actual texts and with rich web-available virtual texts, images and cultural artifacts that support the focus on twelve "capstone" works.  These capstone works, which are organized thematically and can be organized chronologically or not (depending on teacher preference), will teach close reading skills and analytical writing skills, and they will support students' investigation of the various and wide ranging historical and literary periods that the AP exam covers.  Each unit includes a major literary work as well as several auxiliary thematically or generically relevant works.  Ideally, the capstone works will be provided to students as actual books of fiction, poetry and drama, and they will be "supported" by additional poems, short stories, paintings, songs and symphonies, and even movie clips that will illuminate a work's imaginative depth, historical and social importance, and potential for analysis. The relationships revealed by this web of primary texts will help students better understand aesthetic, cultural and historical approaches and reasons to analyze and explain literary texts. The thematic units and their capstone works are listed below:

*     Shakespeare and the Stage (King Lear)

*     God and Man (poetry by John Milton, John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins)

*     The Male Individual and Society (Henry Fielding's Tom Jones)

*     Science and the Rights of (Wo)Man (Mary Shelley's Frankenstein)

*     The Female Individual and Society (Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice)

*     Romantic Poetry and Geography (poetry by William Wordsworth and other Romantic poets)

*     Civil War and Literature (The Red Badge of Courage, poetry by Walt Whitman)

*     Dickens and Industry (Great Expectations or Nicholas Nickelby)

*     The Great Mechanical War (poetry by Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke, In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway)

*     Jazz and Literature (James Baldwin's Sonny's Blues, poetry by Langston Hughes, Alice Walker's "Everyday Use")

*     Post-Atomic and Post-Modern Technology and Literature (Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5)

*     Post-Colonial Worlds (poetry by Derek Walcott, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Sembene Ousmane's God's Bits of Wood, or Jamaica Kincaid The Autobiography of My Mother)

The course will also provide materials and exercises designed to improve students' analytical writing skills, their close reading skills and their AP English Literature test taking skills.  Students will be given frequent opportunities to test themselves according to the writing and reading standards of the College Board, and they will also be challenged to write the longer analytical essays and research projects the advanced student of literature must master. Students' writing and thinking will be evaluated by a trained instructor who will provide extensive feedback on their strengths and weaknesses as analytical writers.

a.)   Main Web Page  Divided into discreet and interchangeable thematic units, the course will be housed within a main web page.  Like a course syllabus in a college-level course, the main web page will include an introduction to the goals and requirements of the course.  Ideally, the introduction will be a template, allowing individual instructors for the course to personalize this information, tailoring it to the conditions of their own course.  From this page, instructors and students can access all course units via a table of contents as well as all topics covered in the course via a course index.  Aesthetically appealing, this page will also feature a slide show of photos of authors and historical events covered in the course. See the discussion of technological components, below, for additional offerings of the course web page.

 

b.)   Thematic Units   Each thematic unit of the course is designed to achieve multiple goals:

*     Coverage of seminal texts and ideas about literature

*     Practice developing one's own original perspective on the literary text(s)

*     Opportunities to test one's reading comprehension at beginner and advanced levels

*     Experience responding to writing prompts similar to AP writing prompts

*     Avenues for further study of the concepts or period introduced by the unit.

Each unit will be organized chronologically with earlier activities and assignments providing the knowledge base and skill sets that will help students complete later activities and assignments. For example, in the Jazz and Literature unit, students are asked first to consider preview questions relevant to the concepts introduced in the story (i.e., what associations do you have with jazz music, how are artists different from the rest of us, what is the artist's function in society, what do you know or suspect about the conditions of African American life during the 1940s and 50s?).  Students will enter their responses to these questions and exchange them with their peers and instructor via real-time interactive chat technology.  Then students would be provided links to content that speculates on the same questions, for example, audio clips of a variety of jazz music, a voice-over lecture about 20^th century African American history, and texts about the role of the artist in society. 

Students would  then read the capstone work, James Baldwin's short story "Sonny's Blues."  Clicking on a link to study questions about the story will enable students to be sure they read accurately for facts and details.  These questions will also introduce students to various ways of "getting at" the text and to possible topics for writing.  Ideally students will have a real-time chat opportunity to discuss these ideas with their peers and an instructor; the web site, though, will also include an audio clip of a lecture about "Sonny's Blues."  Students will then read a related set of poems by Langston Hughes about jazz, blues and Harlem.  Students will again listen to a voice-over suggesting ways to interpret one of the poems.  This voice-over will correspond to the text version of the poem modified by links highlighting particular phrases and words that bear analysis.  Further study questions relevant to the works of both Baldwin and Hughes, and modeled on the free response questions given in the AP exam, will ask students to write about thematic and stylistic connections they see between the short story and the poetry.  The Jazz and Literature unit will also include an interactive multiple choice test similar to the passage analysis multiple choice section on the AP.  Finally, the unit link will offer students opportunities for extra-curricular study whereby they can extend their work on the themes and authors of each unit.  For example, an opportunity for further study relevant to the Jazz and Literature unit would require students to read Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use," and consider questions about folk art, relationships between sisters, the role of women in the African American south.

c.)   Generalized Instruction in Reading and Writing  Core skills and topics to which literature instructors and their students tend to return time and time again, such as "How to Write an Effective Thesis Statement," "Terms for Literary Analysis," "Stylistically Sound Paragraphs," or "Common Sentence Logic Errors," will be accessible during instruction on any content unit and will therefore enable course leaders to personalize their instruction depending on the needs of their students and will enable students to return continually to information crucial to developing excellent reading and writings skills.

d.)   Writing Assessment  Students will be asked to write several types of essays for the course: brief informal responses to passages or ideas, mid-length timed-writing on sample AP prompts, and long analytical essays, all of which will help them practice their close reading and idea development skills.  Instruction on each type of writing will focus on the writing process, on how to approach the task and the prompt, and how to revise for clarity and strength of prose. All formal writing for the course will be evaluated and commented on by the instructor.  In other words, after completing study questions, pre-writing exercises and rough drafts, students will send the finished versions of essays for each unit to their instructor who will evaluate essays based on AP criteria.  Ideally, students will submit their essays anonymously. 

e.)   Teaching Test-Taking Strategies  The AP English Literature test is not primarily a content based test.  That is, students needn't be familiar with an ordained set of particular or specific texts, ideas, facts or terms.  Rather, a successful AP English literature course will introduce students to a broad range of literary texts and terms and will teach students to "think on their feet" during the test.  The AP test requires students to read and understand difficult and presumably unfamiliar passages of literary prose and to be able to interpret them and answer abstract questions about them; also, test-takers must take a topical question and construct an essay in response out of their arsenal of knowledge about the works and ideas they have studied.  That said, knowledge about and practice with the AP test format are crucial, and experience employing certain test taking skills benefits a test taker no matter how many of the "suggested" works he or she has read.  To that end, our AP Literature class offers in each unit opportunities to respond to mock AP questions of two types: multiple choice questions of interpretation based on a close reading of a passage provided, and free-response essay questions.  Moreover, it will include helpful handouts and advice for calming test day jitters, breaking down tasks, and writing and revising in timed situations.

f.) Technological Components The "Jazz and Literature" site will offer the following technological components:

* Audio clips of songs by famous jazz musicians
* Pull-down menus of answers to preview questions, most commenting on relevant poetry or artwork
* An interactive practice AP Exam on a paragraph from "Sonny's Blues," with correct answers thoroughly explained
* A videotaped introduction, with photographic and cinematic enhancement, to the primary lecture on "Sonny's Blues"
* The text of the lecture with photographs of James Baldwin, Harlem and jazz musicians
* "Pause and Reflect" questions that should be answered in an online threaded discussion
* A recording of the primary lectures on "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin and "The Weary Blues" by Langston Hughes
* Links to many educational and informational web sites, such as those supported by universities, museums, and cultural centers
* Links to other multimedia offerings, such as recorded lectures and interviews with James Baldwin, and poems read by Langston Hughes

A special note on threaded discussions. The "Jazz and Literature" unit within the "Literature and Social History" AP English Literature Course asks students many questions, including questions about assigned texts, about students' understanding of course themes and subjects, and about the writing topics covered in the course. Although occasionally the course web page itself may suggest answers to some of these questions, most of them should be addressed by students in threaded discussion groups, or online forums, which participants can link to from the course web page. Depending on the number of students enrolled in a particular class, both intra-school and inter-school forums could be established. Threaded discussion groups will make the class more interactive for the students, and allow them to better create or support the sense of community that is often absent in online courses. In addition, the course manager or instructor can review students' responses to such questions to gauge the quality and quantity of students participation.

Dr. Anne Fleischmann (Ph.D., 1996) has taught for fifteen years at independent college preparatory schools (Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut and Friends Seminary in New York City) and at UC Davis. She has worked with ETS grading Subject A exams every year for the last five, and was the primary author of the UCD English Department's Uniform Syllabus Project and materials.  An expert in American and African-American Literature, Dr. Fleischmann has taught many literature classes at the college level, including an American Realism course co-taught with Andrew Jones.

Dr. Andrew Jones (Ph.D., 1996) has been teaching with technology at U.C. Davis since 1991.  For the past four years he has coordinated the English Department"s Computer-Aided Instruction Program.  He is the author of an online course on Hamlet, has taught instructional technology to high school teachers, serves as a faculty advisor to the U.C. Davis Mellon Foundation Project on instructional technology in general education classes, and sits on the Academic Computing Coordinating Committee at U.C. Davis.  He has given over fifty talks and workshops on teaching with technology.