July Workshops

“College Behind Bars” is a four-hour PBS documentary (now available on Netflix) which follows  a dozen incarcerated students as they pursue a college education under the auspices of the Bard Prison Initiative, a degree-granting program of Bard College. In the film, individual students describe and reflect upon their experience – of college, of prison, and of the world. In doing so, they raise a variety of themes and questions that will be rich to explore: the power of education contrasted with our nation’s educational shortcomings; the role of the liberal arts in fostering engaged citizenship; personal narrative and self-definition; and much more. In the context of a global pandemic, and with higher education in crisis, the film focuses our attention on the most crucial and compelling arguments for the model of college that these students undergo: serious, intimate, writing-based seminars with an emphasis on collaborative learning.   

This workshop will offer a variety of ways to use writing-to-learn practices and include diverse forms -- such as poetry, essay, story, and visual art -- to work with the film in the online classroom. For faculty in the midst of a sudden, unwanted transition to remote or hybrid learning models, closely watching this film and working together through its many implications -- about education, about contemporary society, and about the subjectivity of students -- will provide both practical strategies for new circumstances, and an invigorated connection to what is at the heart of their work as educators. Led by a member of the BPI administration who is also a senior IWT associate, this workshop will also include opportunities for conversation and collaboration with individuals who appear in the film. 

This workshop introduces participants to IWT’s foundational writing practices, while giving participants an opportunity to reflect on how they approach their own writing alongside how they teach writing. Sessions focus on such topics as invention strategies, coaching the writing process, and revision. Because teachers often work without the support of a vital learning community and have little opportunity to write in or outside the classroom, the workshop is purposely communal and collaborative. Teachers write together, exchange ideas, and respond to one another’s work. Through these activities, they become more aware of the composing process and of their students’ struggles to produce expressive and engaged writing. Teachers of all subjects who want to understand how writing generates thinking are invited to participate.
Moscow Standard Time workshop will be in Russian.

Like Writing and Thinking, Writing to Learn introduces participants to IWT’s foundational writing practices, but with a particular emphasis on their application to teaching in specific subject areas. This workshop is multidisciplinary: it models writing strategies that help students explore complex ideas in diverse contexts, such as historical sources, literary texts, or mathematical problems. These writing practices support close reading, encourage students to learn from one another, and help them make personal connections to people, places, and concepts they study. The workshop focuses on using writing to build understanding of texts—a crucial first step in creating formal essays or reports. Teachers experiment with in-class writing assignments and student journals to stimulate engagement in their subject areas. Participants explore how writing-to-learn practices can reshape how we teach and how the academic lecture, collaborative learning, and the act of listening exist in relation to one another.
Central European Summer Time workshop will be in English.

This workshop is designed for teachers who are familiar with the strategies introduced in Writing and Thinking or Writing to Learn (or in similar workshops elsewhere) and who want to focus on helping students write essays. “Inquiry into Essay” focuses on the analytic essay as a finished product, emphasizing ways to pull together fragments of good writing and information into a coherent whole. The workshop begins by defining the essay and considers how its definition changes according to the purpose and content of the writing assignment. Participants explore the differences between the capacity for invention required for informal essays and the knowledge of conventions required for the academic essay. Working on their own essays, participants observe how inquiring habits of mind help determine the shape of what they write.

Focusing on mathematical and scientific texts, this workshop introduces writing strategies that help students develop their understanding of complex ideas. STEM-related writing practices, which can be used in the classroom or in homework assignments, support close reading of texts of all genres and help students make personal connections to the problems, formulas, and experiments they study. Working together, teachers experiment with classroom writing assignments to stimulate engagement with the language, concepts, and mathematical or scientific practices in the subjects they teach. This workshop focuses on ways to use writing to build understanding—an important first step in becoming more reflective and engaged in the process of solving a problem, reasoning through an explanation, or carrying out an experiment.

“History teaches us a way to make choices, to balance opinions, to tell stories, and to become uneasy—when necessary—about the stories we tell,” writes Sam Wineburg in Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. We all have a tendency to process new information through the lens of our entrenched beliefs and values. This tendency can be particularly visible when students grapple with the challenges posed by historical documents. How can teachers help students encounter historical texts in a way that invites them to revise their thinking and helps them become more nuanced, critical readers of history? More important, how can teachers help students see that history is relevant to them personally—that they operate within a historical context and have the power and agency to make historical change?
 
Increasingly, teachers and students seek to encounter history through the lens of justice and social engagement. This workshop seeks to make the study of history exciting, thrilling even, by working with precedent-setting United States Supreme Court Decisions as well as other foundational texts, such as Plato’s Republic; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Constitution; the Federalist Papers; writings from John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others.  Through our encounters with these texts we will work to reinvigorate the study of history, writing to learn what it means to be a citizen of the world.

Creative nonfiction reports back to us from what we call the real world—its subject matter is “documentable . . . as opposed to ‘invented’ from the writer’s mind,” as Barbara Lounsberry puts it. Its subgenres are many: the personal essay; the essay of place; nature writing; family portraits; memoir; writing about war, travel, adventure, food, and more. Creative nonfiction tells stories based in fact, often heavily researched, but always filtered through the lens of what Joan Didion calls “the implacable ‘I’.” It is crafted with tools borrowed from fiction’s toolbox: narrative voice, character, plot, description, dialogue. What good creative nonfiction offers, writes David Foster Wallace, is “clarity, precision, plainness, lucidity, and the sort of magical compression that enriches instead of vitiates. . . . It serves as models and guides for how large or complex sets of facts can be sifted, culled, and arranged in meaningful ways—ways that yield and illuminate truth instead of just adding more noise to the overall roar.” We will begin to experience the particular richness and variety of creative nonfiction in the short texts we read. Writers include Susan Sontag, Teju Cole, Natalia Ginzburg, Richard Rodriguez, Luc Sante, Zadie Smith, Terry Tempest Williams, and Rebecca Solnit, among others, and we will focus on how these writers operate within their subgenre. We will use their works as a springboard into our own creative nonfictions, keeping in mind how we might teach our students to do the same.