Although dystopian novel study is a firm and familiar part of high school English, an awareness of the Utopian tradition in thought and literature is just as important. Tested on a middle-ability Year 9 (14-15 years) class, this 60-page unit can be taught independently or alongside the study of dystopian fiction. This unit looks at how ideas of a perfect world grew from visions of paradise in early religion, through planned societies (focusing on Ancient Sparta), and comical visions (the medieval poem of topsy-turvy land), before appearing as a full description of a social perfection in Thomas More’s Utopia and Michel de Montaigne’s account of Brazil in the 1600s. Each section as an introduction to the concepts and context, and has a core primary text broken into manageable chunks which encourage collaborative learning. There is a variety of writing tasks throughout for students of all abilities. There is an ongoing task, based on the work of Jim Dator, for students to describe their own ideal society. The final assessment (for which the marking criteria are included) draws on this ongoing project and requires a verbal presentation of one aspect of the student’s ideal world. This unit can be taught in an English, History, Social Science, Civics, or Philosophy class.

Writing historical fiction is an excellent way for History students to develop an understanding of historical narrative, cause and effect, empathy, and perspective. Yet many teachers do not feel comfortable introducing an fiction task to the History classroom, or confident in steering students through it in a manner fundamentally different from English. This 10-section workbook engages students in a self-guided exercise in forming a historian’s question, locating sources with which to answer it, and performing a thought-experiment with historical imagination. They write the narrative in stages closely tied to historical skills, and so recognize from the outside the contestability of historical explanations and the relative quality of significance and evaluation performed by different historians. This workbook can be partnered with Diving Bell Education’s Investigating Story and History, a 10-section workbook which guides students through the development of narrative from the earliest human stories to the narratives of the digital era, and shows how History has an innately narrative character.

This free, ten-slide presentation assists students who are reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World to understand the background of art and politics which is essential to the novel.