The Canadian Literature High School Initiative!

Canadian Literature is thrilled to report that we have just sent packages of 2-3 back issues of our journal to over 300 secondary school libraries across Canada! We are pleased to announce the launch of a new project that we have called “The Canadian Literature High School Initiative,” and we’re excited to share with you what the project is all about.

A teacher at a local Vancouver school recently reached out to ask us if we had any spare issues of the journal that she could show to her grade 12 AP students. She wanted them to connect with a physical copy of the academic journal and to hold literary scholarship in their hands. Recognizing that it was better to have back issues of the journal in her students’ hands than on our storage shelves, we were totally happy to share. Her request stayed with us. It made us realize that exploring the contents of the journal and its print culture material might be of interest to other students and educators as well. So, we started a project—The Canadian Literature High School Initiative—of circulating copies of our journal to a range of libraries at secondary schools in all provinces and territories, compliments of Canadian Literature.

We wanted to show what it is that we do at UBC in the Faculty of Arts and we hope through this initiative to help build connections between high school and university scholarship. In each package, we included a special issue on the work of Thomas King because it is still our most popular (and most often consulted) issue and we know that Medicine River, The Inconvenient Indian, and Green Grass, Running Water are often taught.

While we were at it, we let people know about the free open-access web resource we’ve created—the CanLit Guides. We have worked for the past decade to develop this teaching resource that brings research published in the journal into university classrooms. We think it could be of great value to senior high school classes as well (grade 12, AP, and IB English and Social Studies classes particularly). As a reminder: the CanLit Guides contain textbook-style modular chapters and educational activities that we designed to supplement both classroom learning and private study. There are chapters on individual writers and on specific novels, poems, and plays, as well as chapters on Canadian history, literary theory, and culture. There are also some chapters on literary skills like close reading and poetry analysis. Visit canlitguides.ca to explore this free resource.

We hope that teachers and students across Canada enjoy the print copies of the journal. We really hope they can become valuable resources for high schools. Although we shipped to 300+ schools, we know that there are many that we missed. Please help spread the word! If secondary school librarians contact us (and we have the capacity), we can still send some more back issues out.

Ps. Special Subscription Offer: As part of our Canadian Literature High School Initiative, we are offering secondary schools a special Institutional Subscription Rate for four print copies this year: issues 240-243 for $130 (with GST=$136.50) (instead of the regular institutional rate of $245). This offer is available until June 15, 2020. Please visit canlit.ca/subscriptions.