Overview

Improving Secondary and Postsecondary Education

In pursuing the goal of making positive changes in the public schools, the faculty of the MAT Program has supplied leadership in developing and applying a variety of approaches that differ from conventional classroom practices. The MAT Program's teaching internship provides an opportunity to question the tacit assumptions, so often made by teachers as well as students, and to construct, instead, a new educational perspective based upon experience.

In addition to its MAT Program, Bard College maintains three educational initiatives devoted to changing secondary and postsecondary schools. Two of the initiatives, Simon's Rock College of Bard (in Great Barrington, Massachusetts) and Bard High School Early College (in New York City), provide models in which younger students are challenged to perform college-level work. At Bard High School Early College, for example, high school and college faculty collaborate in designing and implementing a curriculum that allows students to complete all high school requirements by the end of grade 10 and to earn an associate in arts degree in the remaining two years. The third entity, Bard's Institute for Writing and Thinking, contributes to the improvement of education by holding faculty writing seminars at public and private schools. Students in Bard's MAT Program have access to these nationally recognized educational initiatives, and work closely with faculty who are involved in these and other important pedagogical developments.