A new class at WHS? : A look at this teacher’s plan

By Antonia Vardal and Hailey Hodsen

An ECE humanities course titled “American Studies” may be coming to WHS in the next few years. This half-year class and half-credit course is described by UCONN as a “multi-disciplinary inquiry into the diversity of American societies and cultures.” 

History teacher Courtney Bradley and English teacher Kristen Mucinskas plan to collaborate to teach students about history by applying it to modern literature. 

Bradley says the history and English classes will eventually combine to form humanities classes. “I like the idea of having more of a humanities approach, which is not only how the world sees itself, [but also how] people just look at the world with a more holistic attitude.” 

Currently, she has several students taking this class as an independent study,  which starts its initial steps in becoming an official course. Bradley says that by doing this, she’s able to get feedback from them about the assignments and readings to improve the class.

Although it’s labeled as an ECE course, Bradley doesn’t want kids to assume they have to be an honors student to take it. 

“[We’re] trying to pull more people in and show more people that you can do really good, amazing, interesting, academic work without the AP, ECE, or honors stamp.” 

She plans to start off the course by connecting American citizenship and immigration to The Hobbit, which will be the anchor book for the rest of the course.

 “Even though it was a book written by a British soldier after World War I about the war, we’re going to take a look at how that applies to American citizenship. That’s a totally different text than you might’ve expected, and we’re going to try and pull in a lot more kids from a bunch of different kind of social groups, almost regardless of whether or not they see themselves as top end kids for academics.”

If students are interested, they should talk to Mrs. Bradley or Mrs. Mucinskas about taking it as an independent study until it becomes an official class. 

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