Faculty Associates

Faculty Associates

Nearly 100 faculty associates in poetry, composition, literature, languages, history, literacy, anthropology, American studies, mathematics, biology, and drama from diverse colleges, universities, and high schools are associated with IWT on an ongoing basis.

Faculty Associates

Faculty Associates
Nearly 100 faculty associates in poetry, composition, literature, languages, history, literacy, anthropology, American studies, mathematics, biology, and drama from diverse colleges, universities, and high schools are associated with IWT on an ongoing basis.

Inspiration & Experience

Workshops are inspired by the diversity of IWT faculty who themselves develop IWT writing practices, drawing on contemporary theories of knowledge and language to develop the best techniques for teaching writing.

IWT faculty bring incredible depth of experience and expertise to the workshops they teach. Their collaborative efforts developing workshops and designing writing practices defines IWT and sets it apart from other writing programs, creative writing workshops, and professional development programs for secondary and college teachers. Below is a list of our active faculty.

Faculty Profile

Featured Teacher Profile

Alan Devenish

Alan Devenish
Alan Devenish is Professor of English, SUNY/Westchester Community College.

Some (ancient) history
Peter Elbow, a person and name unknown to me then, called from Oregon. Would I be interested in teaching in a new summer writing workshop for incoming students at Bard College? I recall from that conversation (was it an interview?) Peter’s warning that summers in the Hudson Valley could be quite hot and humid. After hanging up I wondered why I hadn’t assured Peter that I’d survived many a Hudson Valley summer—from Esopus to Poughkeepsie to Cold Spring. Hot and humid Hudson Valley? Why it’s right there on my résumé, I practically majored in it, etc. I wondered if he’d actually offered me the job and if so, if I’d accepted. My wondering was interrupted by the ringing phone. Peter Elbow calling back. Not sure if I was really interested, thought he detected some hesitation, a tentative note on my part. No no no, I’m interested, I am interested, interested to the point of being honored to teach in this experimental, intensive and otherwise wholly undefined writing course. Let’s not sweat the details, let’s wait for it to get really hot and humid before sweating the details. Let’s just say yes.

Thirty years later there is some debate whether those early days of Language & Thinking constitute a Golden Age, an Arcadian spring of sorts or as blunter pundits would have it, an institutional Stone Age from which more advanced cultures would one day emerge. Moderate minds suggest a promising Bronze Age… In any case, Peter Elbow directed the Language & Thinking program those first two inspiring and perspiring summers, and did so with vision and a tenacity complemented by a rare gentleness of manner. There was as yet no Institute for Writing and Thinking, no workshops beyond those three-week intensities during which we, the initial L&T faculty, devised, tried out and revised in our daily teaching the ideas that would evolve into a shared but uncommon praxis.

I did not look far ahead in those days, certainly not as far ahead as I am now looking back. Thirty years? It was enough to survive three weeks and then think of doing the same for another summer or two. There were no assurances that the Language & Thinking workshops would survive beyond those first summers anyway. But L&T did last, later giving rise to the IWT and generations of teachers who have since sustained and changed the work. I am amazed that my own association with the Institute has endured so long—and grateful that Peter Elbow called back that afternoon in 1981.

Middle Age(s)
How does a successful experiment remain experimental? Can an institute for innovative teaching extend its mission to teachers themselves with the same spirit of lucid intelligence? Can play be serious, can the rigors of curricula, the constraints of a high school schedule, or the demands of a community college classroom be addressed through emphasis on process, writing-as-thinking, language as intellectual and poetic fun? Would what worked with 18-year-olds at the summery start of their college career at Bard translate into the “real” school year, at public and private high schools so unalike, with teachers besieged by everyday anxieties in competition with creative aspirations? These are questions some of us asked then and which we have since sought to answer through a continued engagement with language, teaching and teachers in the many IWT workshops that have come into being over the years, and whose cumulative results must ultimately provide the only legitimate response.

The years since Paul Connolly was named director of L&T and the emergent Institute for Writing & Thinking (of which he was chiefly the creator), until his sudden death in 1998, saw the creation of a number of workshops, most of which have endured—from the initial Writing and Thinking workshop and Writing to Learn in various disciplines, to poetry, narrative, nature, among others—and which in turn inspired newer generations of workshops. We worked in concert, noisy and even contentious concert at times, but together. 

Paul’s own fluency of intellect and his commitment to a communal ethos advanced the work of the Institute remarkably, translating apparently incongruous visions into inspired practice, while accomplishing the demanding business of landing grants, recruiting faculty and expanding the Institute’s work at and beyond Bard, nationally and even internationally. Perhaps Paul’s own background—as (Catholic) chair of the English Department at Yeshiva University—prepared him particularly well in heading such a diverse congregation of colleagues. I was never sure if Paul’s linguistic habit of registering surprise, frustration or bemusement with a deep, sighful “O dear god” was meant as simple interjection or genuine invocation of divine intervention into the sometimes restive workings of the Institute for Writing & Thinking. More secularly, he drew sustenance from the writings of Montaigne, whose meandering inquisitiveness Paul often evoked and whose Que sais-je? could stand as Paul’s own motto of intellectual curiosity, a what-do-I-know suspicion of absolutes, a healthy dose of doubt for each asserted verity and a good-humored respect for life’s humbling contrarities. 

This growth into a kind of institutional maturity was not without tension, as many of us moved (deeper) into our own middle age while new and often younger faculty taught in L&T and led IWT workshops, and Bard itself expanded in numbers of students, programs and buildings dramatically. It is difficult to situate a true mezzo along the life journey of an institute or an individual. It’s all pretty subjective, or as Julian Barnes writes in Flaubert’s Parrot, “the past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report.”  

Teresa Vilardi (an actual medievalist), whose history with the Institute, as long-time Associate Director, then Director of IWT, is unsurpassed, has not only witnessed but guided change within the Institute while the college and the larger educational terrain have transformed. From the sad and unsettled time after Paul Connolly’s death to the present, Teresa has sustained what is at the heart of our enterprise while leading its growth and renewal. Of course, what appears as quiet steadiness and unfailing kindness from one vantage point may well feel like frenzied pressure to the person trying to keep sane while running an institute and accommodating the wishes, ideas and personal quirks of colleagues, administrators and workshop participants while construction crews build an empire outside one’s office door. For the rest, I will let Teresa serve as her own parliamentary reporter.

And an update
I teach at Westchester Community College and continue to lead workshops for the Institute, most recently a writing-to-learn workshop in human rights, co-designed with my colleagues Teresa Vilardi, Rob Whittemore and Susan Kirschner. It has proven to be one of the more challenging workshops, reminding me that “experiment” and “successful” are words separated by a gulf of trial and error. Creating and leading this workshop raises the perennial question of how to keep writing central to the work while engaging in a subject, such as human rights, at once so vast and mutlifaceted. How do we respond to issues and texts of such complexity through writing, while doing justice to the depth and breadth of the content? How do we “cover the material” in a way that writing becomes a deep engagement with ideas and texts and not a mere adjunct or “exercise”? In leading workshops for the Institute over the years I have not encountered this content/process tension to such an extent, perhaps because other, more intrinsically language-focused workshops, such as poetry (which I have led most often) lend themselves so fluidly to writing-as-learning, whereas a subject such as human rights resides in such diverse milieus, disciplines and events. I am reminded that it is not easy to keep writing at the heart of learning. In that sense I still feel new at this work. My years of teaching for the Institute have been years of learning. But I need not look further than my community college for evidence of the difficulty writing presents for many students—like Pete, a forty-something ex-marine coming back to school for a hopeful second career, who described  his experience with poetry as “swimming upstream with all my clothes on.” (When I remonstrated, “But Pete, that’s a metaphor!” he gave me one of his inimitable “Professor—please” eye rolls.)    

I can’t rightly measure how or if the nearly thirty years of Writing & Thinking have changed us—those of us who have taught, those we have taught. So it is with all teaching, perhaps. There are moments, months, years, even decades. For myself, my relationship with the Institute has been the most important and enduring experience of learning and teaching that I could have hoped to have. It has been hard work and good fun. It has been hot and humid.

Alan Devenish
August 2011