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    IWT Workshops

    Are you interested in exploring writing-based teaching methods, cultivating new ways for students to read and respond to texts in your classroom, or rethinking the role of writing across the curriculum?

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    The Bard IWT Center for Liberal Arts and Sciences Pedagogy (CLASP) works with faculty and institutions in the Open Society University Network (OSUN) to promote student-centered teaching methods, writing-based teaching, and experiential learning.

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    IWT Workshop at Ward Manor

    Since its inception, Bard IWT has helped teachers develop writing practices that enliven classroom learning through writing.

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Main Image for July Weeklong Workshops

July Weeklong Workshops

Please note that Bard College’s current COVID-19 policies require all campus visitors to show proof of full vaccination. We are expecting the July Weeklong Workshops to take place in person, but we will continue to monitor the evolving situation and Bard College’s COVID-19 policies, as informed by state and county guidelines.

July 10–15, 2022

The July weeklong workshops help teachers deepen their understanding of writing-based teaching, its theory and practices, and its application in the classroom. Each workshop focuses on a particular form of writing—the essay, the academic paper, creative nonfiction—or on writing-based teaching in a particular subject area, such as history, science and math, or grammar.
 
The workshops offer a retreat in which participants learn new writing practices, read diverse texts, and collaborate with teachers from around the world on the Bard College campus. The luxury of time helps us envision how we might make these new practices our own by adapting writing prompts, accommodating collaborative learning in larger classes, and incorporating new readings. We also explore how different forms—like poetry, for instance—might inspire students from diverse backgrounds.
 
During the week, teachers live in private dorm rooms on the Bard campus, eat meals together, and enjoy the beautiful setting and lively atmosphere of Annandale-on-Hudson in the summer. Workshop groups meet for fourteen sessions, beginning Sunday evening, July 10. Subsequently, groups meet three times a day between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., except Wednesday and Friday, the final day, when workshops conclude at 1 p.m. Workshops are capped at 15 participants.
 
The schedule gives participants time to explore the scenic Mid-Hudson Valley and take advantage of lovely walking paths on Bard College campus. The week also includes opportunities for socializing and features a guest author reading from recent work. Meanwhile, the Bard SummerScape festival showcases an extraordinary program of performing arts and an international roster of acclaimed artists. For more information and to reserve tickets, visit fishercenter.bard.edu/summerscape.
 
Workshop offerings include:
Writing & Thinking
Writing to Learn
NEW! Reflective Writing for Agency, Equity, and Community
NEW! Writing-Based Teaching and Antiracist Pedagogies
Writing and Thinking: Restorative Words, Restorative Practices
Inquiry into Essay
Teaching the Academic Paper
Thinking Historically through Writing
Writing to Learn in the STEM Disciplines
Creative Nonfiction: Telling the Truth
Creative Nonfiction: Hybrid Narratives and the Power of Voice
Revolutionary Grammar

Read the full workshop descriptions in the expandable list below.

Register here!

Registration and Fees

  • Tuition
    A $250 non-refundable deposit is required to hold your spot in your first choice workshop.

    The rates below apply to registrations made before or on June 10, 2022, the deadline for all discounted rates.
    Early-Bird Rate: $2,500
    Early-Bird Group Rate: $2,250
    Early-Bird Commuter Rate: $2,200

    Early-Bird/Commuter/Group Rate: $1,980

    The rates below apply to registrations made after
    June 10, 2022.
    Standard Rate: $3,000
    Group Rate: $2,700
    Commuter Rate: $2,700
  • 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 undergraduate or graduate program in education) and in-service teachers with limited professional development funds. Deadline: June 1, 2022
    Apply for Scholarship Funding

    Tuition must be paid in full prior to arrival. 
    Groups of three or more teachers from the same institution will qualify for the Group Rates.
    No overnight accommodations are provided for commuting participants but you are welcome to partake of meals at the dining hall.

    IWT CLASP is offering limited spaces in the July workshops for OSUN partners. Interested OSUN faculty should email [email protected] indicating which workshop they hope to participate in and why. Your home institution will be responsible for travel and visa fees. Decisions will be made on a rolling basis with priority given to representing a range of OSUN partners.

2022 Workshop Offerings

Writing & Thinking

This foundational workshop introduces participants to IWT’s writing-based teaching practices, while giving participants an opportunity to reflect on how they approach their own writing and how they teach writing. The goal of the work is to create, nurture, and sustain a writing-based classroom. Sessions focus on writing practices, engagement with texts, revision strategies, and developing learning communities in the classroom. The workshop is purposely communal and collaborative: teachers read and write together, exchange ideas, and respond to one another’s work. Through these activities, teachers become more aware of the scaffolding behind the composing process and better perceive the roots of their students’ struggles to produce expressive and engaged writing. Together, we discover how writing generates equity, community, and responsibility within a classroom. Teachers of all subjects who want to understand how shared writing practices can generate rich thinking and learning are invited to participate.

Writing to Learn

Like Writing and Thinking, Writing to Learn introduces participants to IWT’s foundational writing-based teaching practices, but with a particular emphasis on their application to specific subject areas and disciplines. This workshop is multidisciplinary: it will draw on a variety of works that might include historical sources and literary and scientific texts. The workshop focuses on using writing to build an initial understanding of texts—a crucial first step in creating formal essays or reports—and to revise this preliminary thinking as understanding deepens. We will explore how writing-to-learn practices can reshape how we teach and how the academic lecture, collaborative learning practices, and the act of listening can reinforce one another within the classroom.

Funded by a generous grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program.

NEW! Reflective Writing for Agency, Equity, and Community

In How We Think (1910), John Dewey writes that when we are faced with a difficulty or dilemma, “we metaphorically climb a tree; we try to find some standpoint from which we may survey additional facts and, getting a more commanding view of the situation, may decide how the facts stand related to one another.” We achieve this more commanding view through our capacity for reflective thinking, which helps us recognize not only how concepts connect to one another, but also how we, as learners, relate to those concepts. Process writing, a cornerstone of IWT’s writing-based teaching, is an essential reflective practice. We make space for reflection at the end of most writing sequences; it is an opportunity to assess how our initial thoughts have evolved by exploring them in writing and by hearing the writing of our peers. We flip through the pages in our notebooks and trace our steps back through the movement of our minds to understand both process and content. Reflection paves the way for us to approach the next learning experience with a better sense of how we make meaning; it sharpens critical thinking and normalizes struggle. This workshop will investigate the principles and practices of metacognitive writing and focus on how to make process writing integral to our teaching. We will interrogate our goals as educators, delve into the pedagogical literature on metacognition, and explore how reflective practices can foster equity and community in our classrooms. We will work across genres and disciplines, exploring how reflective practices can enrich both academic and creative writing. From small-scale daily work to playful and collaborative activities that promote democratic learning communities, we will explore what can happen when we make reflection central to our students’ learning.

NEW! Writing-Based Teaching and Antiracist Pedagogies

This workshop, designed for teachers of all disciplines, uses IWT’s foundational writing practices to explore how writing-based teaching can help foster an intentionally antiracist, equitable, and inclusive classroom community. Reading and writing together, participants will explore ways to think about race and identity within our classrooms and practice strategies to support nuanced and thoughtful discussions. We will apply these strategies, in turn, to other pedagogical practices such as developing assignments and providing feedback to students. We will also consider ways to navigate history, language, and trauma in texts from diverse disciplines and contexts. In order for teachers and students to co-create antiracist learning communities, the workshop will model collaborative, interdisciplinary activities that encourage self-reflection, invite active listening, and cultivate a more expansive and inclusive classroom environment.

Writing and Thinking: Restorative Words, Restorative Practices

Restorative Words, Restorative Practices introduces participants to IWT’s foundational writing practices, while giving participants an opportunity to learn how restorative justice can be integrated into their classrooms and learning communities. Rather than solely placing restorative justice outside the classroom, as alternative conflict resolution, we bring RJ principles of community building, accountability, active listening, and shared, empathic learning inside the classroom. In this spirit, workshop sessions relate IWT’s writing-based teaching strategies and restorative justice practices to explore how they support one another. The workshop is multidisciplinary, and we will read and write texts across genres as participants explore their own writing and activities for helping their students’ writing, reflection, and creative and critical thinking. Teachers of all subjects who want to understand restorative justice and how writing generates thinking are invited to participate.

Inquiry into Essay

This workshop introduces dynamic and generative writing-to-learn practices designed to coach students through the drafting and revision process for analytic essays. To begin, it considers how we define the essay and ways this definition can shift according to the purpose and content of the project. Writing together, we  experiment with the kinds of exploratory writing that can help students find points of entry into challenging texts, explore and articulate their readerly perspective, and affirm their ability to uncover fresh insights. Working on their own essays, participants will focus on the creative and collaborative tools for teaching the analytic essay. We highlight strategies for pulling together fragments of good writing into a coherent whole; practice the kinds of inventive and exploratory writing that can produce a draft; and explore the use of the conventions that characterize formal writing. 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 coaching students through the drafting and revision process.

Teaching the Academic Paper

Essay writing is a struggle for many students, and the transition from high school– to college-level expectations often proves to be a particular challenge. This workshop helps to bridge that gap by exploring what we value in academic writing and offering writing-to-learn methods for teaching students how to use sources, pose key questions, and make mindful connections to a topic or text. We will unpack the complexities of reading and research in our respective disciplines, attending to the ways we build meaning and advance academic conversations through inquiry, interpretation, and synthesis. We will explore the questions and trends surrounding academic writing, including the challenges of a shared nomenclature—is it an essay, a paper, or an article?—and the role of the writer’s presence. We will also consider the value of assigning traditional academic assignments (e.g., the term paper or the five-paragraph theme) and consider alternative methods and genres. In the process, participants will come to a better understanding of how they can best prepare their students to engage in research and writing.

Thinking Historically through Writing

“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 importantly, 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? 

The workshop focuses on writing-to-read strategies for analyzing primary documents, secondary texts, and visual artifacts so that participants learn how historians interpret evidence and construct stories based on those interpretations. Many imaginative teaching strategies enrich and enliven students’ appreciation of the past. Writing is the least used and yet perhaps the most versatile of these strategies, since it allows students to discover a world that differs from the present and to appreciate different—and often conflicting—interpretations of key moments in the past.

Funded by a generous grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program.

Writing to Learn in the STEM Disciplines

This workshop introduces writing-to-learn strategies that help students develop their understanding of complex ideas in science and mathematics. In STEM classes, writing is most often used to assess what students know—or don’t know—on tests, lab reports, and assignments. By contrast, this workshop focuses on using writing as a tool for constructing knowledge. It introduces writing practices that help students find points of entry into challenging texts and concepts, interrogate their understanding when it is still fuzzy, tentative, or mistaken, and revise their thinking. Working together, participants experiment with collaborative and exploratory writing prompts that stimulate close reading of scientific and mathematical texts, problems, and images. In addition, we will explore how writing practices can deepen engagement and spark curiosity—an important first step in becoming more invested and reflective in the process of solving a problem, reasoning through an explanation, or carrying out an experiment.

Creative Nonfiction: Telling the Truth

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.

Creative Nonfiction: Hybrid Narratives and the Power of Voice

New hybridized narratives of literary nonfiction—forms such as documentary poetry videos, multimedia storytelling, graphic memoir, and autofiction—are powerful mediums for exploring questions of justice, historiography, and identity. This workshop will delve into hybrid essays, poetry comics, podcast investigations, cultural reportage, and selections from nonfiction novels. Drawing on the work of writers such as William Hazlitt, Maggie Nelson, C. D. Wright, and Tyehimba Jess, the workshop will explore the narrative voices at the heart of hybrid nonfiction. Reading and writing collaboratively, we will examine and create work that marries reporting on the real world to personal connections. We will encounter what Rebecca Solnit has called the “vital power” of voice-having, including its crucial aspects of “audibility (people can hear you), credibility (people are willing to believe you), and consequence (your words have an effect).” This workshop will offer practices for creating hybrid narratives and explore the many ways that their structures communicate ideas and information while developing richness of character and plot.

Revolutionary Grammar

Everyone—inside and outside the academic community—has an opinion about grammar. Parents, CEOs, and, of course, teachers worry that students graduate from high school and college without understanding the rules of grammar. But what does it mean to know grammar? If it were simply a matter of learning rules, teachers would not be struggling to correct grammar in paper after paper. In any case, basic grammatical rules don’t stick. This workshop looks at both the philosophical and practical questions surrounding the teaching of grammar and investigates connections between philosophy and pedagogy. Using diverse literary texts and our own writing, we ask what grammar is, what it is for, how it contributes to the making of meaning and to creative expression, and how it can be taught using the fluid models for teaching writing that we value. Participants learn practical approaches to teaching grammar that do not focus on rules but rather draw on students’ intuitions and habits as writers. This workshop is for teachers of English, composition, and grammar, and for any teacher who addresses issues of grammar. Previous participation in Writing and Thinking or Writing to Learn is a prerequisite for this workshop.

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