Bella: the First Step

by James Jobbins

Beyond English Language and Literary Arts: The Studio Story (1)

Back in Autumn 2013, after a few months of teaching a pretty broad and loose set of writing classes, my ideas for literature teaching came together in a course called BELLA.

When I myself was a literature student back in England, my degree course had surveyed literature broadly chronologically (book-ended by Old English and Yeats and Eliot in the first year) and had at each stage placed literature in its historical context.

I wanted to do something similar for school-age children so in its first version, which was just one semester, BELLA introduced students to literature from Shakespeare to the present day, up to and including Cold War espionage fiction. 

Then in its second year, a full two semesters, I started all the way back with Beowulf.

As well as enjoying beautiful, seminal poems, plays and novels, students wrote inspired stories and essays.

The name BELLA came from an effort to communicate that this would not only be an English Language Arts course. It would set literature in its historical contexts as well as showcasing the beauty of the best printed and performed prose and verse.

At the time of writing the course, Mrs Jobbins teased me that the name had something slightly hubristic in it because, as she said, "After "Beyond", then where would Studio go next? Beyond beyond? Beyond Part II?"

She had a point: BELLA took a two-year break in 2015-17 as I developed and taught Advanced Literature, then Big History. 

So, while I hope Studio has gone somewhere worthy of the promise that BELLA made, I am very happy to say that BELLA will be made available from September 2017 for a whole new set of middle school students.

BELLA will be taught by some of most intelligent, enthusiastic, well-read and focused teachers of literature and writing I have been lucky enough to know in my lifetime. That really is very exciting and very humbling for me, that such experts and enthusiasts would take this simple idea and commit to making it meaningful and real for our students.

What follows is the course introduction as written back in 2013.

 

BELLA is an advanced course designed for international school students who are operating at a high level intellectually and whose English is effectively native for educational purposes.

‘Effectively native’ means that a student’s English does not usually interfere with their ability to reach their intellectual and creative potential when the language of instruction is English, in lessons as taught in native English-speaking countries.

In practice, this means three things: the ability to understand a teacher’s verbal explication without language supports; grade level reading level (native-English grade level); and the ability to express complex and creative ideas accurately, first time and most of the time, in speech and writing.

Once students reach that level, the BELLA program takes students beyond ordinary grade level knowledge through Studio’s trademark focus on deep cultural and historical immersion, broad skills development, and higher order thinking skills.

Students can expect to go deeper, into history and philosophy; broader, into the expressive skills of oral presenting and digital publishing; and higher, into the thinking skills of analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, the building blocks necessary for cultivating creativity.

 

—— To be continued ——

These stories are told from Studio perspective. Every family has its own story with Studio. We’d like to hear and publish yours too. Please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

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