Collaboration leads to new 'Novels to Film' course at Carson City's Pioneer Academy
Submitted by Carson Now Reader on Thu, 04/07/2022 - 3:30pm
Helen Keller said, “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” Instructors at Western Nevada College and Pioneer Academy are beginning to embrace this sentiment by collaborating on a new course for Pioneer students.
After a number of meetings, where ideas were shared and logistics were discussed, the team of WNC and Pioneer staff members decided to offer a college course, English 200 Novels to Film, right on the Pioneer campus. Geraldine Pope, an instructor at WNC, has designed a rigorous and engaging course that is sure to pique students’ curiosity.
According to the syllabus, students will study “film and novels to examine the transformation in genre when novels are made into films.” It is not all a walk in the park, though. The course also emphasizes critical reasoning and writing skills.
On the Pioneer campus in Carson City, English teacher Rebecca Allen will be teaching the course. Using feedback from students, Professor Pope and Mrs. Allen have worked together to tailor the course to include stories and films in the genres students enjoy the most.
The course is dual credit, meaning that upon successful completion of the course, enrolled students will earn three college credits and one high school credit. Not only will the Novels to Film course help students get a jumpstart for college, but it will also help to expose them to the wide variety of classes students can take as they explore the world of higher education.
Jesse Elias, a senior at Pioneer, says he really enjoys the discussions in class and Jassmen Dominguez, also a senior, is excited about the idea of earning college credits. Spencer Duncan, a junior, enjoys the stories and the films. He joined the class because his best friend “really loves film,” and he thought the course would be interesting.
The readings in the course cover a wide range of time periods and genres, from Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” to Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life." The students are only a few weeks into the course and are already engaging in thoughtful conversations and writing about big ideas like free will versus determinism, the ethics of policing people’s private thoughts, the perception of time and memory as sequential or simultaneous, and much more. Like the famous quote from the film Cabalanca, everyone involved in this collaboration thinks, “this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."
