Special Initiatives

Seminars
Through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for Faculty Humanities Seminars, the IWT directed two seminars—in 2000-2002 and 2003-2005 on “Human Rights: Idea, History, Case Study,” and on “Reading Narratives in Four Religious Traditions” for teachers in the Mid-Hudson Valley. Bard faculty from the departments of history, political studies, literature, and religion were presenters and IWT Faculty associates led discussion sessions using IWT writing practices. At the conclusion of each seminar, a special session addressed classroom application of the texts and the writing practices. Lessons developed in these seminars became the basis for several current IWT workshops, including Human Rights: A Writing to Learn Workshop, and Reading Narratives in Four Religious Traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).

Workshops for doctoral candidates, University College Dublin
In January 2008 and 2009 IWT led two-day workshops in Thinking Historically through Writing: Writing and Research for 20 first-year graduate history students at University College Dublin. Focusing on writing practices to support research and to advance progress on writing the dissertation, doctoral students in history used IWT writing practices to more clearly define their research questions, examine documents, and investigate secondary texts. The workshop also created a forum in which students could exchange ideas and engage one another's research topics, becoming for that moment the model of a scholarly community.

Special Initiatives

quotation markThe approaches to learning fostered by IWT are central to our culture of learning at Bard High School Early College-Queens. Sitting together in a trusting group, writing our way to new insights about a shared question or text, hearing what others have thought, rereading, venturing renditions, interpretations, or improvisations inspired by all that has been read and heard: that is how the year begins for our students and teachers alike.
     The collaborative, respectful, and exploratory atmosphere of the Writing and Thinking Workshop carries over into all our classes, whether the particular challenge is designing an experiment to calculate the acceleration of falling bodies, weighing competing hypotheses about the causes for war, or analyzing the appeal of a particular song.quotation mark

—Patricia Sharpe, dean of studies, Bard High School Early College -Queens

quotation markThe philosophy of writing and thinking goes to the very core of our high school early college mission. The ability to begin each year with a full week of writing workshops reminds student and faculty of how we will use writing in all our classes for the remainder of the academic year [...] Writing [...] is a habit of mind that sustains us as an intellectual community.quotation mark

—Ray Peterson, principal, Bard High School Early College, Newark

Seminars
Through grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities for Faculty Humanities Seminars, the IWT directed two seminars—in 2000-2002 and 2003-2005 on “Human Rights: Idea, History, Case Study,” and on “Reading Narratives in Four Religious Traditions” for teachers in the Mid-Hudson Valley. Bard faculty from the departments of history, political studies, literature, and religion were presenters and IWT Faculty associates led discussion sessions using IWT writing practices. At the conclusion of each seminar, a special session addressed classroom application of the texts and the writing practices. Lessons developed in these seminars became the basis for several current IWT workshops, including Human Rights: A Writing to Learn Workshop, and Reading Narratives in Four Religious Traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).

Workshops for doctoral candidates, University College Dublin
In January 2008 and 2009 IWT led two-day workshops in Thinking Historically through Writing: Writing and Research for 20 first-year graduate history students at University College Dublin. Focusing on writing practices to support research and to advance progress on writing the dissertation, doctoral students in history used IWT writing practices to more clearly define their research questions, examine documents, and investigate secondary texts. The workshop also created a forum in which students could exchange ideas and engage one another's research topics, becoming for that moment the model of a scholarly community.