As I began my work as Fishtank Learning's newest curriculum director, the first task on my to-do list was to develop a new vision for our high school ELA curriculum. I had done this work before at a previous employer, but this time was different. Some of my beliefs about general teaching and learning had shifted. My literacy philosophy, specifically my perspective about what teenagers should experience through the texts, projects, and assessments given to them in their ELA classes too had evolved. So, the task of creating a vision that did not have to be influenced by bureaucracy or politics, and could solely focus on teachers and students was like a dream come true for me.
As I crafted the vision, I asked myself the question: What does the perfect 9–12 ELA curriculum look, sound, and feel like? In my attempt to answer it, I considered the role that text selection, writing and grammar, academic discourse, and assessments should play in our curriculum.
After I completed an initial draft of the new approach, I reviewed and analyzed the current high school ELA curriculum. I wanted to see what was there, but most importantly I wanted to see what wasn’t.
I read and probed:
- What genres of texts are currently included in our curriculum?
- What authors and voices are represented in our curriculum?
- What perspectives are included?
- Whose stories are we allowing to be told? Which stories need to be told but are missing?
- What does our current curriculum reveal about our high school English Language Arts vision and priorities?
- To what extent does our curriculum provide students a plethora of opportunities to hone writing skills, to write to learn, to engage in research, to develop nuanced written arguments, and to share their writing with peers?
- To what extent does our curriculum provide students opportunities to engage in deeper learning via performance tasks and unit projects, and collaborate with others to present, defend, and argue?
While refining and editing the curricular vision, I was reminded of Toni Morrison’s essay “Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” in which she explains that “invisible things are not necessarily ‘not there;’ … a void may be empty, but is not a vacuum.” This quote in large part inspired the lens through which I thought about text selection and course themes for grades 9–12.
With this in mind, I sought to create a high school curriculum that makes what is invisible in literature—black, brown, Asian, and indigenous characters, authors, and perspectives—visible. More specifically, it became my goal to pay particular attention to people, cultures, voices, and perspectives that are typically neglected and absent from the traditional literary canon while coupling them with texts from the canon. This approach is significant because it can provide students with mirrors and windows — mirrors that allow them to see their own identities, experiences, and motivations, and windows that allow them to gain insight to build empathy for the identities, experiences, and motivations of others.
It is my goal to create a curriculum that exposes students to novels, drama, poetry, nonfiction, art, and multimedia that will will allow them to “encounter possible persons, versions of [themselves] that [they] would never see, never permit [themselves] to become, in places [they] can never go and might not care to, while assuring that [they] get to return home again” (from Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Novels Like a Professor).
Reflecting on all of these considerations, I created the following tenets to guide my redesign and redevelopment of the Fishtank ELA high school curriculum:
- We believe in the power of diverse, relevant, and rigorous texts.
- We believe in reading and experiencing whole texts (novels, nonfiction books, and dramas) authentically before unpacking them.
- We believe in using writing as a means for brainstorming, processing, explaining, synthesizing, and arguing ideas.
- We believe in discussing what we read, write, and think.
- We believe that grammar including rhetorical skills and syntax structures should be taught in context and used to develop a writer’s unique style.
- We believe that assessments should be performative, authentic, varied, and applicable to the real world whenever possible.
We will begin publishing new units for 9th and 10th grade ELA in Summer 2021. The units in the current Fishtank High School ELA curriculum will continue to be available as a part of our ELA archive.
Ebony Moses is the ELA Curriculum Director for grades 9-12. She began her career at KIPP Academy Lynn Middle School, where she taught 7th grade Reading for two years. She then went on to teach high school ELA in New York and New Jersey at Harlem Village Academies High School and KIPP: Newark Collegiate Academy for 5 years. Prior to working at Fishtank, she served as the Director of Secondary Literacy Curriculum, grades 5-12 at KIPP NJ and an Assistant Principal at Dream Charter High School. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Masters of Education in Curriculum and Instruction from Boston College.