BSHS
Brown Summer High School, a summer enrichment program for local high school students, is a three week course in which students take two courses designed around essential questions. For the summer of 2022, the overarching question across English classrooms was: "What is justice, and who decides?". Courses are taught by students enrolled in the Master of Arts in Teaching and Undergraduate Teacher Education Programs at Brown University.

English 1A

Course Description: Throughout the course English 1A, students engaged with the speculative fiction novel PET by Akwaeke Emezi and its themes of justice, identity, personal responsibility. While also exploring supplemental texts related to the novel’s themes such as poetry and short stories, students learned how to annotate various texts to make claims, find evidence, articulate themes and viewpoints, and discuss with one another. Students integrated their lived experiences with class texts by reflecting on their personal experiences and applying them to the texts. Students practiced writing speculative fiction and other forms of creative writing across multiple genres, and accomplished writing a personal narrative that could be used in college applications. Students built a community of learners who were able to hold intense discussions with one another, sharing their viewpoints and building off of their classmates’ contributions. In addition to reflective writing, students practiced identifying and applying sensory details, figurative language, and genre to their own writing. As a final assessment, students created and presented a narrative that can be used as a personal essay for college applications. Students also created a class zine in which they reflected on their progress in this course and on our essential question. Throughout the summer, students connected their own lives to PET while enhancing their listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills centered around an exploration of the text’s themes of justice, identity, and personal responsibility.