Curriculum

Course Offerings

Curriculum

Literature Courses

The distinguishing feature of the MAT Program's literature curriculum is its integration of history and method, with a clear commitment to addressing the particular challenges and demands of teaching English in middle and high school classrooms.

History

The literature curriculum treats history not as a transparent medium used to sort literary figures, genres, and themes but rather as a dynamic process of definition and redefinition of what constitutes the literary. The history of literary criticism, and of the institution of English studies, is a major focus of the curriculum. The student gains a firm grasp of history as a practical concern—for example, understanding who Shakespeare's contemporaries were and what was going on in the world around him as he wrote The Tempest—and as a strategy for affirming the value of literary study. As world literature becomes increasingly prevalent in secondary and college education, a solid understanding of the history of English becomes more crucial than ever in imagining new ways to study the canon.

Method

High school teachers need to guard against the common practice of falling into unexamined approaches to the literary texts they have studied. For example, the New Criticism, which focuses on close reading and textual analysis, continues to be the default mode of most English instructors simply because this is the way poetry has been taught for the past 50 years. Students in the MAT literature program develop a high degree of critical understanding to use when it comes time to make choices about their own teaching. If, for example, they decide to introduce their students to a postcolonial reading of a text, it is the goal of the MAT Program's literature curriculum that they do so with a solid understanding of how that approach has been shaped over time.

Sample Calendar

The course descriptions that follow are organized into two categories: by discipline, and by discipline and pedagogy. The first category is the cluster of courses that engage students in graduate-level studies, challenging them to grapple with the questions, forms of inquiry, and knowledge making that constitute the work of the discipline. The second category is that set of studies and experiences in public school classrooms that allow developing teachers to consider their fields of study as sites for learning and how their work as teachers engages less experienced learners in the authentic work of their respective fields.