The new Angle: Financial Commentari on a Literary Text (Teaching Guidance)

This master’s thesis is a set of teaching materials based on the general school syllabus in literature and aiming to help a teacher raise students’ awareness of financial literacy. The course is developed to be widely used in present day schools in Russia. The paper comprises twenty teaching modules in literature for students of 5th to 11th forms. Each module consists of a lesson plan and a supplement, which includes relevant extracts of source texts and works of literary criticism. My purpose was to use literary texts that are engaging and comprehensible for middle school students so as to give them a picture of what everyday life was like in different historical periods. I also attempt to outline the system of economic relations in the society, and find a place in the general historical context for each text with all its descriptions of people’s characters and daily life of the period. The financial component has a special place in the analysis of each text. I have tried to evaluate its role in the plot and the life of each character, as well as define motives associated with it. Keeping this in mind, I also tried to select meaningful texts where the author’s position could be a subject of discussion. My lessons aim to give students a better idea of daily economy and financial relationships in different periods and use both synchronic and diachronic analysis to achieve this goal.