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: Rebirth, Reform and Revolution * Renaissance Mentalities and Societies * Spirit of Reformation * Seventeenth Century of Scandal * Satire and its Discontents * Revolution: Politics, Science and Justice * Industrial Revolution: From Tools to Machine Fourth Semester Focus: War, Peace and the Modern Family * Romanticism: Nature vs. Nurture * Realism: The Child's Extended Family * Nationalism and Propaganda * Representing World Wars I & II in Film * The Holocaust and its Children * The Nuclear Age: Hiroshima Year Zero * Initiation to Research 1 Third Year Curriculum Fifth Semester Focus: The American Dream/Nightmare * Conquest and Slavery in the Americas * Calvinism and Puritanism * Immigration and Pluralism in American Society * Socratic Origins of Democracy: Oligarchy vs. Meritocracy * Politics (what we do) vs. Morals (what we say we do) * The Consciousness of Race, Gender & the Spirit of Place * Varieties of (American) Religious Experience Sixth Semester Focus: Individualism, Capitalism and Responsibility * Cosmological Poetics and the Civil War * Transcendentalism in Context * Civil Disobedience and Civil Rights * Significance of the Frontier in American History * Capitalism and Labor Movements * Representing the Depression in Film * Realism and Expressionism in American Theater * Initiation to Research 2 Fourth Year Curriculum: Global Societies in Theory and Practice Seventh Semester Focus: The Myth of Everyday Life * Introduction to Contemporary Theory * Daily Transformation: The Living Metaphor of Myth * Myth Today: Language and Media as Systems * Research, Writing and Revision of Senior Thesis 1 Eighth Semester Focus: The Psychopathology of Everyday Life * Psychology of Loss, Recovery and Memory * Theme of the Double in Literature and Film * A Social History of Madness, from Euripides to Dostoevsky * Research, Writing and Revision of Senior Thesis 2 Advanced Placement (AP) Because of the challenging interdisciplinary approach taken in English/Humanities at the NWA, students become well prepared for the national Advanced Placement exams. Success in these end-of-year tests allows individuals entering college/university to be awarded credit for lower division requirements (or to have them waived by admissions officer of the college) in English Composition and/or Literature.