English III American Studies

Course Overview

American Studies is a program that is an interdisciplinary approach to American history and literature. This course mirrors the topics and themes found in the US History Standard and Honors courses. Students will work with nonfiction readings, primary sources, fiction, and diverse classroom activities in order to help them connect with the important issues in our country today. In addition, students consider human behavior as a means to understanding historical and current choices. By enrolling in the American Studies program, students will find that their work in the Social Studies section is much more intertwined with the work they do in the English section of American Studies, as literature will be a crucial part of illuminating the history that is studied. Students should expect to have a number of projects and assignments that will crossover between the two courses. Throughout the course, students will engage in practicing literacy skills for both social studies and English in the form of researching, document analysis, civil discourse, and presentations of well supported arguments and counter-arguments.

About Our Curriculum

The curriculum for each English course is continually reviewed and revised to ensure every student receives an engaging, rigorous learning experience aligned with the Massachusetts Curriculum Framework for English Language Arts and Literacy.

Course teams meet regularly to review student learning and make informed adjustments to curriculum and instruction to meet their students' unique needs and strengths. While teachers collaborate to establish shared learning experiences with core content, essential skills, and common outcomes within each course, we also intentionally preserve flexibility for teachers to tailor select texts, assignments, and learning experiences and to adjust unit sequencing or instructional approaches as appropriate.

For this reason, the unit overviews on this site represent the course's shared learning goals and experiences; specific texts, assignments, and sequencing may vary by teacher and class section. Please check your teacher's Schoology page regularly for the most current information about your student's class, including upcoming novel and media selections.

Thank you!

Ms. Crystal Laliberte, MA, CAGS
English Curriculum Coordinator, Grades 6–12

Living Documents: Democracy's Values & Methods

Learning Targets

By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:

Closely read foundational American texts, analyzing how language, structure, rhetoric, and historical context communicate ideas about democracy, rights, equality, freedom, and citizenship.
Analyze how writers develop and refine central ideas and arguments through claims, reasoning, evidence, rhetorical appeals, diction, and purposeful structural choices.
Examine how foundational American documents establish ideals that later writers, speakers, and citizens interpret, invoke, challenge, and seek to expand.
Evaluate differing perspectives on American democratic ideals, including tensions between the principles expressed in public documents and the lived experiences of Americans.
Integrate evidence from primary sources, speeches, literature, historical documents, and contemporary texts to develop increasingly complex interpretations of American values.
Develop evidence-based analytical and reflective writing that connects individual experience and perspective to larger questions about American identity, values, and democratic ideals.

Essential Questions

What values and ideals define American democracy?
How does language shape our understanding of rights, freedom, equality, and citizenship?
Who has historically been included in the promises of American democracy, and who has been excluded?
How have Americans interpreted and challenged the promises contained in our founding documents?
How can a document remain "living" as society and its understanding of democratic ideals change?
What responsibilities accompany participation in a democracy?

Instructional Snapshot

To meet the learning targets, students will:

Closely read foundational American documents alongside speeches, primary sources, literature, and contemporary texts that examine American values and democratic ideals.
Analyze rhetoric, including ethos, logos, and pathos, as well as diction, structure, reasoning, and evidence to determine how writers influence particular audiences.
Examine how writers and speakers across different historical contexts invoke, reinterpret, or challenge American ideals, including voices such as Frederick Douglass and Shirley Chisholm.
Compare the promises articulated in foundational documents with individual experiences and historical realities.
Engage in evidence-based discussion and interdisciplinary activities that connect rhetorical and literary analysis with historical inquiry.
Produce analytical and reflective writing that connects personal experience and perspective to larger questions about American values and identity.

The Vietnam War: A Case Study on the American Identity & the Power of Stories

Learning Targets

By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:

Analyze how literature and nonfiction represent complex and sometimes conflicting experiences of war, power, patriotism, responsibility, memory, truth, and American identity.
Analyze how an author's choices regarding point of view, chronology, structure, characterization, imagery, and language shape meaning and aesthetic impact.
Examine metafiction and other sophisticated narrative techniques that intentionally blur distinctions among fiction, memory, storytelling, and historical reality.
Analyze how multiple themes develop and interact to create complex accounts of individual experience and national history.
Evaluate how perspective shapes what individuals understand, remember, and communicate as "truth," particularly when accounts of the same experience conflict.
Construct nuanced interpretations using strong and thorough textual evidence while recognizing ambiguity, contradiction, and what a text deliberately leaves uncertain.

Essential Questions

Do the stories we learn about the Vietnam War challenge, change, or confirm our understanding of American values and history?
How do the ideas and goals of those in power shape the lives of ordinary people?
What is the importance of truth? How does storytelling contribute to "truth"?
How does a person's perspective shape their understanding or experience?
How can we strive to understand multiple perspectives and truths?
What power do stories have to shape individual and collective memory?

Instructional Snapshot

To meet the learning targets, students will:

Closely read complex literature about the Vietnam War, such as Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, alongside primary sources, historical accounts, and other nonfiction.
Analyze how point of view, metafiction, structure, chronology, imagery, and language complicate distinctions among factual truth, experiential truth, memory, and storytelling.
Trace interacting themes involving power, war, identity, responsibility, memory, truth, and American values.
Compare literary representations with historical sources to consider how different forms of evidence contribute to our understanding of the past.
Engage in timed analytical writing and evidence-based discussion requiring close reading and interpretation of ambiguity.
Synthesize literary and historical evidence through interdisciplinary project work examining the question, "What is true?"

Dreaming of America

Learning Targets

By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:

Analyze how complex literature and nonfiction develop ideas about immigration, identity, belonging, labor, home, and the American Dream.
Trace how multiple themes develop and interact across texts to produce complex representations of immigrant experiences and American identity.
Analyze the impact of specific words, figurative language, rhetorical patterns, and shifts in perspective on meaning, tone, and representations of time and place.
Examine how an author's cultural and historical context, identity, perspective, and purpose shape representations of migration and belonging.
Compare individual experiences with broader historical, cultural, economic, and political narratives about immigration and opportunity.
Synthesize research and personal narratives to communicate a coherent, evidence-based understanding of how immigration shapes individuals, communities, and American identity.

Essential Questions

How does a person's immigration story shape their individual identity?
What does it mean to belong? What do we gain from belonging, and what is the cost?
How do immigration opportunities and limitations affect different communities in America?
How does the idea of the American Dream influence migration?
How do lived experiences complicate the cultural ideal of the American Dream?
What is the relationship between home, place, and identity?

Instructional Snapshot

To meet the learning targets, students will:

Independently read a complex immigration-centered work selected from varied voices and experiences, such as The Best We Could Do, American Street, Beautiful Country, The Joy Luck Club, Outcasts United, The Namesake, or Solito.
Analyze how writers use diction, figurative language, perspective, structure, setting, and other literary choices to communicate experiences of migration, belonging, identity, and home.
Place individual stories in conversation with historical sources, immigration policies, labor issues, and contemporary nonfiction.
Compare cultural narratives of the American Dream with the lived experiences represented across literary, historical, and informational texts.
Conduct research and responsibly integrate information through paraphrase, quotation, attribution, and citation.
Synthesize research and storytelling by producing an extended podcast centered on immigrant experience and its relationship to larger questions of American identity.

Stories of the Land, Identity, and Justice: Indigenous History

Learning Targets

By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:

Analyze Indigenous-authored literature, narratives, and informational texts for complex ideas about land, identity, sovereignty, memory, community, resilience, and justice.
Analyze how perspective, structure, diction, syntax, imagery, and cultural context shape meaning and influence representations of people, places, and histories.
Trace how multiple themes and central ideas interact across literary, historical, and contemporary texts.
Evaluate the consequences of a "single story," including how dominant narratives can marginalize, distort, erase, or oversimplify communities and experiences.
Compare sources and perspectives to examine how histories are constructed, challenged, and revised as additional voices and evidence enter the conversation.
Build on others' ideas in sustained, evidence-based discussion while articulating and refining an independent interpretation.

Essential Questions

How do differing relationships to land shape individuals, cultures, communities, and societies?
What are the long-term and contemporary impacts of policies involving forced removal, land ownership, and sovereignty?
What are the dangers of a single story about Indigenous peoples of the United States?
How can stories counter invisibility and erasure and reshape dominant narratives?
How have Indigenous knowledge, stewardship, activism, and resilience influenced broader American society?
Who has the power to tell the story of a place and its people?

Instructional Snapshot

To meet the learning targets, students will:

Read Indigenous-authored literature, such as Tommy Orange's There There, alongside historical, informational, and contemporary texts about land, sovereignty, identity, and justice.
Examine the concept of the "single story" and analyze how perspective and representation influence cultural and historical understanding.
Closely analyze diction, syntax, structure, imagery, perspective, and other authorial choices that shape representations of identity and place.
Compare literary representations with historical evidence and contemporary perspectives to investigate how narratives are constructed and contested.
Practice research and source integration skills, including paraphrasing, citation, and responsible use of evidence.
Participate in a sustained Socratic seminar that requires preparation, strong textual evidence, active listening, building on others' ideas, and thoughtful engagement with competing perspectives.

Race, Reconstruction, and the Long March toward Freedom

Learning Targets

By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:

Analyze how complex literature represents the enduring effects of race-based slavery, racism, resistance, freedom, and the continuing struggle to expand American democracy.
Trace two or more themes across characters, generations, settings, and historical periods, analyzing how they interact to create a complex account of American experience.
Analyze the impact of an author's choices regarding structure, characterization, point of view, imagery, symbolism, setting, and language.
Examine how literature illuminates the human experiences underlying historical events, institutions, policies, and movements for social change.
Analyze how struggles for freedom are represented through literature, art, music, rhetoric, and other forms of cultural expression.
Construct sustained literary analysis using precise claims, strong and thorough textual evidence, logical reasoning, and purposeful academic style.

Essential Questions

How has America's history of race-based slavery shaped the nation and the lives of its people?
How have beliefs about race shaped American identity and culture?
How have struggles for Black freedom expanded American democracy?
What forms of resistance have people used in the pursuit of freedom, and what influences their effectiveness?
How has the struggle for freedom been expressed through literature, art, music, and culture?
How can and to what extent should a nation confront, heal, and reconcile with the wounds of its past?

Instructional Snapshot

To meet the learning targets, students will:

Read and closely analyze complex literature examining race, identity, freedom, family, memory, and the enduring consequences of historical systems, such as Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing.
Trace themes and patterns across characters, generations, settings, and historical periods to examine continuities and changes in American experience.
Analyze how literary choices transform broad historical forces into individual and human experiences.
Place literature in conversation with primary sources, historical accounts, art, music, and other cultural texts from the Black Freedom Struggle.
Engage in close reading, evidence-based discussion, and analytical writing that acknowledge complexity, ambiguity, and competing interpretations.
Develop a sustained literary analysis that advances an arguable interpretation and supports it with strong and thorough textual evidence.

The Fight for Liberty & Justice for All

Learning Targets

By the end of this unit, students will know and be able to:

Analyze how writers, speakers, artists, and activists use language, rhetoric, storytelling, and other forms of communication to influence audiences and advance social change.
Evaluate complex arguments by examining claims, reasoning, evidence, rhetorical appeals, assumptions, counterclaims, and competing perspectives.
Analyze how rhetorical choices vary according to speaker, audience, purpose, historical context, and medium.
Conduct focused research using credible sources to investigate the development, strategies, communication, and impact of a social movement.
Synthesize evidence across primary sources, literature, speeches, legal texts, historical accounts, and contemporary sources to develop informed conclusions about civic agency.
Communicate an evidence-based perspective that connects historical case studies to enduring questions about equality, democracy, power, and social change.

Essential Questions

To what extent has American activism helped the nation move toward a "more perfect union"?
What tactics have Americans used to effect social change throughout American history?
How do art, speeches, literature, and other modes of communication contribute to social movements?
How do audience, purpose, context, and access to power influence the effectiveness of rhetoric?
What can past movements teach us about the possibilities and limitations of civic agency?
What responsibilities do individuals have in the continuing pursuit of equality?

Instructional Snapshot

Investigate social movements using primary and secondary sources that represent multiple forms of civic communication.
Closely analyze rhetoric from writers, speakers, activists, and legal voices, such as Harvey Milk's "The Hope Speech," Audre Lorde's "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," and relevant judicial opinions.
Evaluate how ethos, logos, pathos, evidence, structure, diction, and other rhetorical choices influence particular audiences.
Research a social movement using credible sources and apply year-long research skills in source evaluation, paraphrasing, in-text citation, and Works Cited development.
Compare strategies for social change and examine how historical context, communication, institutions, and access to power affect their outcomes.
Synthesize research into a project that traces significant events and demonstrates how individuals and groups use civic agency to pursue social change.

Ongoing Skills

Instructional Snapshot

Across all six interdisciplinary units, students will continue to:

Independently read and comprehend increasingly complex literary and informational texts representing varied genres, cultures, periods, and perspectives.
Cite strong and thorough evidence, analyze interacting themes and central ideas, and examine how authors' structural, rhetorical, and stylistic choices shape meaning.
Write routinely for analytical, argumentative, explanatory, reflective, and creative purposes in both shorter and sustained assignments.
Strengthen command of sentence structure and conventions through purposeful practice with sentence combining, coordination, transitions, semicolons, colons, punctuation, and concise expression.
Conduct increasingly independent research by evaluating source credibility, paraphrasing accurately, integrating evidence, documenting sources, and applying appropriate citation conventions.
Participate effectively in collaborative discussions by preparing with evidence, building on others' ideas, evaluating competing perspectives, and articulating increasingly precise interpretations.

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