Cross Case Features: Teachers

Montview High School: Language Arts

Catherine Styne, Humanities Chair, English Teacher

Catherine Styne has been the Humanities Chair at Montview High School for over a decade. She also teaches one English course. The teachers in her unit speak highly of her and wonder how things will go when she retires at the end of this school year.

Development of Inter-Disciplinary Unit

After the seminar, Catherine worked with Hannah Moss, the Media Specialist and fellow NCTA participant, to design a three-week unit on China and Japan. In this interdisciplinary unit, they link Asian studies to content standards in English, history, arts, and information literacy. Students read nonfiction and fiction selections from either China or Japan and choose their materials from the Asian collection at Montview. In the process of learning about the geography and culture of China and Japan, students develop skills related to writing, interpreting sources, and presenting their findings in an oral report and in an informal five-paragraph essay, which is a common assessment opportunity for all ninth graders.

Catherine Styne says that the ninth-grade Asian unit gives students “a taste for [China and Japan],” and then they get it again in World History and U.S. history. One of the ninth-grade English teachers appreciates the combination of having Asia in both the English and history curriculum and the timeliness of offering it to ninth graders. This teacher also sees that the China/Japan unit yields some collegial benefits for teachers: “We don’t always have anything that we are teaching in unison. Because this is sixteen solid days that, at one point or another, everybody is doing, it just energizes you.” Catherine Styne would like to focus a common assessment opportunity for sophomores around the assimilation of Asian and other immigrants in the United States.

In her Advanced Placement (AP) English class, Catherine Styne includes a section on contemporary Asian writers of short stories and “it is all because of stuff we have here [in the Asian Resource Center] and what I learned about at the [NCTA] course.”

Resources and Training for English Teachers

Catherine Styne was the only English teacher to take the NCTA seminar so she and media specialist Hannah Moss specifically designed the China/Japan unit to train English teachers to teach about Asia. The unit contains background information for the English teachers and includes numerous handouts from the NCTA seminar. According to Catherine Styne, “No other English teachers took [the NCTA seminar.] Our job was to train them. We cut out articles on everything we took from the NCTA program, the geography of Japan and China. We made packets for all the English teachers. So basically we trained the whole English staff on Japanese and Chinese literature.”