NW Academy

The High School program is a college-prep program which culminates with the completion of two college-level quality senior theses.

Course requirements include four years of English/Humanities, three years of Science, three years of Mathematics (most students take a fourth year of both Science and Math), and two years of Foreign Language, as well as Computer Literacy, Physical Education, Community Service, and electives in visual, performing and media arts.

Students who have completed the upper level courses may enroll in advanced-level courses through Portland State University. They may also choose to work during their senior year as interns or apprentices in arts-related industry or professional settings. In addition, they are exposed to well-known civic leaders, artists and other professionals speaking through the weekly Lunch Event series at the school.

Our graduates are sought by industry, universities, and colleges alike; including some of the best small colleges in the country. Graduates have opportunities for travel and study abroad.


	English/Humanities at The Northwest Academy combines studies in language and literature with other disciplines traditionally held separate from each other: History, Social Studies, Civics, Economics, Philosophy, and Comparative Religions. Building on interdisciplinary concepts and problems derived from reading, as well as personal experience, the student begins to practice a "perspectivist" approach to understanding the range, depth, and complexity of human experience. The chronology built into the sequence of courses provides the student with a systematic grounding in the history of ideas. By emphasizing such concepts as form and genre, cultural structures and belief systems, historic scandal and personal transformation, the curriculum also works to guide the student into a personal practice of critical analysis as articulated in writing, reading, and visual media. With successive initiations to research methods built into second and third-year courses, all NWA students learn how to frame original questions and bibliographies. In doing so, they demonstrate mastery of the structure and mechanics involved in searching primary and secondary sources, which culminates in their production of two substantial thesis essays (one per semester) during the fourth year. First Year Curriculum First Semester Focus: Writing Fundamentals and Foundations of Culture * Review and Mastery of Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling * Review and Mastery of Sentence Structure and Syntax * Art of the Paragraph * Understanding Concepts and Connecting Ideas * Pre-history and the Oral Tradition * Archaic Mythologies Second Semester Focus: Comparative Religions and Medieval Myths * World Religions and Religious Empires * Prophets, Poets and Teachers * Europe's Middle Ages and Feudalism * The Chivalric Ethic in Context * The Social Function of the Storyteller Second Year Curriculum Third-Semester Focus: A World Of Certain Order And Meaning • Myth, Concept, Violence, and the Sacred • Power, Reform, and the Renaissance Mind • Satire: Social Class and the Invention of Difference • Satire: Enlightenment and Secularism Fourth-Semester Focus: A World Of Uncertain Order And Meaning • Science, Nature, and the Politics of Knowledge • Romanticism: Nature v. Nurture • Revolution, Realism, and WWI • Propaganda, the Holocaust, WWII, and the New Realism • The Nuclear Past and the Nuclear Future Third Year Curriculum Fifth-Semester • Focus: The American Dream/Nightmare • Socratic Origins of Democracy • Rhetoric and the Art of Argumentation • Conquest and Slavery in the Americas/Hierarchies of Subordination • Heroification and Revisionist History • Transcendentalism and the American Identity • Ecocriticism: Literature and the Environment Sixth-Semester Focus: Individualism and Social Consciousness • American Greatness and The Democratization of Tragedy • Capitalism, Socialism, and American Labor • Representing the Depression in Literature and Film • Pluralism in American Society • Varieties of (American) Religious Experience • Immigration, Identity, and The Spirit of Place • Initiation to Research Fourth Year Curriculum: Global Societies in Theory and Practice Seventh-Semester Focus: The Myth of Everyday Life • Realism in Literature and Art • War and the Modern Memory • History of American Suburbia • Varieties of Modernism • Postmodern Film, Neorealism, and The New Wave • Tragicomedy and the Transience of Desire • Research, Writing, and Revision of Senior Thesis 1 Eighth-semester Focus: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life • Psychology of Loss, Recovery, and Memory • Analytical Psychology and The Study of Dreams • Theme of the Double • Psychoanalysis in Literature and Film • Solipsism and the Atomic Individualist • Parody, Formalism, and the Postmodern Aesthetic • Research, Writing, and Revision of Senior Thesis 2 We are happy to announce that the Northwest Academy will be offering Senior Thesis, spring semester 2009, as a 200-level College Writing course through Portland State University’s Challenge program. A student who successfully completes the course receives the same credit that would be given to a student on the PSU campus.