ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. (PRWEB) July 03, 2019
From July 7 to 12, the Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT) welcomes more than 150 middle school, high school, and college faculty members to campus for weeklong workshops which explore the role that writing plays in teaching and learning across disciplines and grade levels. This year’s workshop attendance is one of the largest in IWT’s thirty-eight year history. Participants come from schools across the United States and around the world to devote a week to the immersive study of writing-based teaching practices. Faculty participants represent many of the college’s network campuses, including the Bard Prison Initiative, Bard High School Early College Cleveland and Washington, D.C., the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences of Saint Petersburg State University, Al Quds Bard, American University of Central Asia, and Bard College Berlin.
Sixteen concurrent workshops will be offered, each focusing on a disciplinary or pedagogical context where writing-based teaching has proven to be exceptionally useful for student engagement and critical literacy. This summer marks the introduction of several new workshops to IWT’s regular offerings: Thinking Historically Through Writing: Justice and the Law; Writing-Based Teaching: Ecosystems and Climate Change; and Best Practices for Inquiry-Based Teaching (a bilingual workshop offered in Russian and English). These new workshops speak to IWT’s responsiveness to the contemporary moment and the new challenges and standards on teachers’ minds. Writing-Based Teaching: Ecosystems and Climate Change, for example, offers faculty an interdisciplinary opportunity to explore how writing-to-learn strategies can help students build their understanding of the urgent and multifaceted topic of global climate change. Through rigorous work with a range of texts—political, geographical, economic, and scientific—this workshop aims to support teachers as they explore the pedagogical challenges that arise when teaching current hot-button topics.
All workshops involve diverse texts, the chance to collaborate with fellow educators from around the globe, the opportunity to learn new classroom techniques, and provide hands-on experiential practices that support and emphasize critical thinking, writing, inquiry, and discourse. The unifying goal is to deepen student learning.
During the full week of workshops, teachers live in single rooms on the Bard College campus, eat meals together, and enjoy the beautiful setting and lively atmosphere of Annandale-on-Hudson in the summer.
IWT will host a public reading and conversation with poet and essayist Dawn Lundy Martin on Tuesday, July 9 at 7:00pm in Olin Auditorium. Martin is a Professor of English in the writing program at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. She is the author of four collections of poetry, co-editor of the recent anthology, Letters to the Future: BLACK WOMEN/Radical Writing (Kore Press, 2018), and the recipient of a 2018 NEA Grant in Creative Writing. Reception and book signing will follow the event.
The Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT) has more than thirty years of experience offering faculty development programs that enrich and enliven classrooms across disciplines through a focus on the role of writing in teaching and learning. IWT promotes pedagogical innovations that, in the words of former director Teresa Vilardi, “emphasize the need for teachers to develop a practice for writing-based teaching, not simply a collection of strategies.” These writing-based teaching practices emphasize collaboration, active learning, experimentation, playfulness, and inquiry across subject areas.
Workshop registration is limited to 15 teachers per workshop. For more information and to register, visit http://www.writingandthinking.org.
To learn more about the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking, view this short video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUamZK9Uwp0).
About Bard College
Bard College is a four-year residential college of the liberal arts and sciences with a 155-year history of academic excellence. With the addition of the Montgomery Place estate, Bard’s campus consists of nearly 1,000 park-like acres in the Hudson River Valley. The College offers bachelor of arts degrees, with nearly 50 academic programs in four divisions—Arts; Languages and Literature; Science, Mathematics, and Computing; and Social Studies—and Interdivisional Programs and Concentrations. Bard also bestows several dual degrees, including a B.A./B.S. in economics and finance, and at the Bard College Conservatory of Music, where students earn a bachelor’s degree in music and a B.A. in another field in the liberal arts or sciences. Bard’s distinguished faculty includes winners of MacArthur Fellowships, National Science Foundation grants, Guggenheim Fellowships, Grammy Awards, French Legion of Honor awards, and Pulitzer Prizes, among others.
Over the past 35 years, Bard has broadened its scope beyond undergraduate academics. The College operates 12 graduate programs and has expanded to encompass a network of regional, national, and global partnerships—including dual-degree programs in four international locations; the Bard Prison Initiative, which grants college degrees to New York State inmates; and Bard High School Early Colleges, where students earn a high school diploma and an A.A. degree in four years. Bard’s philosophy sets a standard for both scholarly achievement and engagement in civic and global affairs on campus, while also taking the College’s mission to the wider world. The undergraduate college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, has an enrollment of more than 1,900 and a student-to-faculty ratio of 10:1. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.