April Conference 2025

Serious Play: Cultivating Joy in the Writing Process

April 25, 2025
9:30 am – 4:30 pm
The 2025 April Conference is hybrid. Join us in person at Bard College or online!
Registration is open!

Ross Gay, photo by Natasha Komoda.

Serious Play: Cultivating Joy in the Writing Process

We are thrilled to announce that poet and essayist Ross Gay (The Book of Delights, Inciting Joy ) will join us virtually for a reading and a Q&A at our 2025 April Conference.

The 2025 April Conference celebrates the value of serious play, a principle that lies at the heart of IWT practices and pedagogy. A sense of playfulness can unlock our writerly inhibitions, slyly disarm the ever-lurking critical voice, and expand our capacity for joy and delight in the difficult intellectual work of writing. To be playful with our writing is to let ourselves be knocked off-balance by words and ideas (our own and others’), to be discombobulated and able to laugh about it.

How can we invite our students to see playfulness, openness, and experimentation as a vital part of their writing process?

The April Conference will apply writing-based teaching practices to welcome serious play into our writing and into our classrooms. We will invite close attention to the ordinary, and hold small daily pleasures alongside ineluctable struggles and hardships. “Grown-up joy,” Ross Gay has said, “is made up of our sorrow, just like it’s made up of what is pleasing to us.” We will use collaborative writing, games, movement, and performative interpretation of texts to instill bold curiosity and renew a sense of play.

Registering online vs. in-person: What to expect

The 2025 April Conference is a daylong workshop in small, interactive groups. It is a hybrid event, and participants can join us in person at Bard College or online.

Join us in-person at Bard: After checking in and receiving your notebook and anthology, you will begin the day in your workshop group, reading and writing together and drawing on a rich anthology of texts. Everyone will gather, along with online participants, for a midmorning hybrid plenary session in which Ross Gay will join us online for a reading and Q&A. After lunch, you will reconvene with your workshop group to conclude the day with collaborative reading, writing, and discussion. The schedule also includes short coffee breaks.

Join us online: You will start the day on Zoom in your workshop group, reading and writing together and drawing on a rich digital anthology of texts. Later that morning, you will join the hybrid plenary with Ross Gay (a different Zoom link), for a reading and Q&A that will connect you with our live audience in Annandale. That afternoon, after a break for lunch, you will reconvene with your workshop group (at the original Zoom link) to conclude the day with collaborative reading, writing, and discussion.

Registration & Fees

Tuition

Fee: $625
Includes tuition, lunch, coffee and refreshments, and an anthology of cross-disciplinary readings.

Early Bird Fee: $550
Must register one month before the workshop date; tuition must be paid in full prior to arrival.

Group Discount Fee: $562.50
10 percent discount for teams of three or more from the same school.

Early Bird Group Discount Fee: $495
10 percent discount for teams of three or more teachers from the same school. All must register one month before the workshop date; tuition must be paid in full prior to arrival.

Cancellation policy. No refunds will be issued for cancellations made later than one week before the Conference.

REGISTER TODAY!
Credit and Scholarship Opportunities

CTLE Credit
All Bard IWT workshops are Continuing Teacher and Leader Education approved in New York State. The April Conference is 5.5 CTLE hours.

The Teresa Vilardi Scholarship
IWT welcomes scholarship applications from those studying to become teachers (i.e., those registered in Bard’s MAT Program or another accredited program in education) and in-service teachers with limited professional development funds.

Scholarship applications are now open! Please apply by March 25, 2025.
APPLY TODAY!

Hear it from our participants

“WOW. Just WOW!”

“It has been so inspiring to be in the company of such brilliant leaders and teachers, and to have specific strategies for and openings toward writing, thinking, and speaking with students.”

—April Conference 2024 participants

April Conference 2023

Crafting, Composing, Conversing: The Writer’s Voice Reconsidered

Friday, April 28, 2023

In our classrooms, voice means all kinds of things: the literal voices we invite into conversation, the unique style and personality we recognize in a beloved author’s work, the almost mystical sense of “authenticity” that we hope will vitalize our students’ writing. The 2023 IWT April Conference will be an ambitious, daylong dive into what we value in “voice” and how we teach students to develop their writerly voices.

The metaphor of voice, writes compositionist Kathleen Blake Yancey, invokes a mix of meanings that are layered, evocative, and sometimes contradictory, ranging from metaphorical to mystical: “You have it or you don’t” or “You know it when you see it.” Voice, according to Peter Elbow, has become a “warm fuzzy word” that people use to describe writing they like or that does something appealing they can’t quite pinpoint. He adds, “We’re in trouble if we don’t know what we mean by the term.” In small, interactive workshop groups, we’ll work toward a clear, nuanced, and, above all, practical understanding of voice. We’ll aim to eschew the mystical but keep the magic, identifying clear and transparent language that can help our students recognize, develop, and experiment with voice in their writing. We’ll also consider some challenges and dilemmas: how can hesitant writers, for example, or students writing in a second language tap into voice? Can a strong voice get in the way of an essay’s substance or argument? How do we honor and create space for our students’ diverse voices—both spoken and written? The April Conference will draw on IWT writing-based teaching practices rooted in the interplay of written and spoken voices to explore voice as concept, craft, and conversation.

The 2023 conference keynote will feature Peter Elbow, acclaimed author of Writing with Power, who will join us online. Elbow played an instrumental role in the founding of Bard IWT, and we are honored to welcome him back!

April Conference 2022

Wide-Awake Thinking: Metacognition and the Power of Process Writing

The 2022 April conference focuses on the foundational IWT practice of process writing—writing that invites reflection on one’s own writing, learning, or thinking. Long traditions in educational philosophy, writing studies, and pedagogical research have called attention to the transformative role of metacognitive reflection in learning. Metacognition not only helps learners build awareness of their own learning, but also empowers them to take action by planning and directing their learning. “Upon its intellectual side,” wrote John Dewey, “education consists in the formation of wide-awake, careful, thorough habits of thinking.” Reflective practice can also revolutionize the affective and social dimensions of learning. It helps us to take a step back and examine our own positionality in the work that we do—as students and as educators. Metacognition can be a powerful tool for cultivating critical consciousness, illuminating how race, gender, and socioeconomic status shape our classroom dynamics and our world and helping students to recognize their place within these dynamics.

This year’s conference focuses on the powerful role that writing—and process writing in particular—plays in fostering “wide-awake” habits of self-reflection in our students. Many teachers know from firsthand experience how generative process writing can be. The conference invites educators of all disciplines to shake up their rhythms of process writing and to explore a more expansive vision for metacognitive practices in their teaching. In small workshop groups, participants will use writing-to-read practices to probe the rich philosophy and pedagogy of process writing. We will experiment with new ways to implement reflective writing practices, not merely as a coda to a learning sequence or assignment (and sometimes the first thing to get cut!), but as a pursuit that permeates every aspect of the learning process. Collaborative, writing-intensive workshops will be a laboratory for generating more effective, creative, and multifaceted process writing prompts. Our work will seek to address the many dimensions of metacognition: What do we know? How do we learn best? And how can we recognize and respond to dynamics of inclusion, exclusion, and agency in our midst? Working together, we will explore ways to include a reflective practice in order to support our students’ identities and sense of place and to foster equity in our classrooms.

April Conference 2021

Posing Problems: Crafting Questions that Transform Learning

Fifty years ago, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed was first published in English. In it, the Brazilian educator and philosopher famously argued that education should not be about transferring knowledge into students’ minds, but rather about inviting students to become “critical co-investigators” with the teacher. At the heart of Freire’s argument is the concept of “problem-posing education”—pedagogy in which students confront problems that are genuine, important, and rooted in the here-and-now. This year’s conference revisits Freire’s challenge to teachers by focusing on the art of problem-posing. How do we present students with genuine problems that allow them to take ownership over their own learning? What kinds of texts and activities spark their inherent curiosities? And how do we pose questions that empower students to think of their readerly and writerly pursuits beyond the walls of a school?

Freire’s emphasis on the co-creation of knowledge by students and teachers resonates deeply with the goals of IWT’s writing-based teaching practices—to build a space where all learners have a voice and a desire to contribute to the larger conversation that is education. Writing-based teaching, just like problem-posing education, begins with the question itself. Every teacher who has struggled to create a good question appreciates the skill this requires. How do we craft questions that foster inquiry and genuine problem-solving? How do we empower students to generate their own questions, ones that they care deeply about? Freire believed that people are authentic beings “only when engaged in inquiry and creative transformation.” How can we use writing—within ambitious curriculums and syllabi, full lesson plans, and ever-present assessment requirements—to generate engagement with meaningful problems?

For Freire this challenge was not only pedagogical but political: “Students, as they are increasingly posed with problems relating to themselves in the world and with the world, will feel increasingly challenged and obliged to respond to that challenge. ...Their response to the challenge evokes new challenges, followed by new understandings; and gradually the students come to regard themselves as committed.” We will look to IWT’s writing-based teaching practices to investigate these ideas from theoretical and practical standpoints. Together, we will write to imagine how a problem-posing approach might transform our classrooms and how writing can help create a democratic learning space.

April Conference 2019

Why Write? Reimagining High School and College Essays

“Every essay …creates a working ethos of attempting—to the utmost—the improbable.”
Joan Retallack

Essay writing is often a struggle for many students, with the transition from high school to college-level expectations proving to be one of the most academically challenging shifts. Expectations for high school papers—whether the five-paragraph “theme” or the three-point AP model—do not, typically, meet traditional standards for college writing. Questions of audience, various styles of argumentation, the uses of evidence—and even such basic requirements as a thesis rather than a topic sentence or disciplinary-specific citation-styles—can radically diverge from what students have been accustomed to in grades 8–12. How can high school teachers, who often feel as if they are “straddling the line” between providing the basics of reading comprehension and preparing students for the more complex thinking required by college courses—help bridge these gaps?

This year’s annual conference provides teachers and professors with an opportunity to reconsider how the modes of writing that students learn in high school can be utilized in college. In Habits of the Creative Mind (2016), Ann Jurecic and Richard E. Miller propose that “the best writing is curiosity driven and is carried forward by creative acts of connective thinking.” This kind of writing stands in direct contrast to the more typical “recipe-based approach” that results in formulaic prose. How do we encourage students of all levels to see “writing as an act of thinking”?

As Paul Connolly, IWT’s founding director, said in an interview in 1983, “most students seem to be going through the motion of writing. They're not attached to it. Their writing tends to be perfunctory and it tends to be thoughtless." How do we encourage imaginative thinking and the valuing of the writing process, while also fulfilling the demands of standardized testing and state standards? How might writing-based practices for deepening critical analysis better prepare high school students for college? What classroom practices can address such specific needs as, how do we engage students as readers and writers while asking them to conform to the particular demands of form, style, and content?

This year’s conference will address these questions from theoretical and practical standpoints. Together, we will write to explore how the essay is approached in both high school and college; with particular attention to the “high school essay” that is part of the college application process. We will look to IWT’s signature writing-based teaching practices for new ways to use informal and formal writing to foster community, help students respond productively to intellectual challenges, and smooth the transition from one set of skills to another—with a minimum anxiety. Finally, we hope this conference day will offer us the chance to be both teachers and writers, remembering the creativity and curiosity that writing provokes.

April Conference 2025

Serious Play: Cultivating Joy in the Writing Process

Registering online vs. in-person: What to expect

Registration & Fees

Hear it from our participants

April Conference 2024

April Conference 2023

April Conference 2022

April Conference 2021

April Conference 2019

April Conference 2018