Special Topics Workshops
JOIN US FOR THESYRACUSE UNIVERSITY PROJECT ADVANCE
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AT MINNOWBROOK CONFERENCE CENTERBLUE MOUNTAIN LAKE, NYJULY 22-27, 2012 |
Our Workshops, Our Faculty, About Minnowbrook, Workshop Fees & Tuition, Registration, Testimonials
Special Topics Workshops are facilitated by Syracuse University faculty and are open to secondary educators for professional development experience. Certified SUPA instructors have the added option of enrolling in these workshops for SU graduate credit at a significantly reduced tuition rate.
The workshops address current topics within the fields of literary, cultural, and composition and rhetorical studies—to communicate enhanced content knowledge and classroom pedagogy—as well as topics of broader significance for teachers in the arts and sciences, e.g. research strategies across the curriculum. These workshops are offered as part of SUPA’s professional development program.
Workshop participants have the opportunity to enroll in one or two workshops during the five-day retreat. Syllabi, required textbook lists, and any course readers for the workshops will be sent to participants upon receipt of the registration form.
Our Workshops
ENG 600: Beyond the Screen: Reading and Teaching New Media (Hanson)
Our experience of texts has shifted considerably in the last century as we increasingly read and process them through a screen. While print, films, video games, and other modes of expression have traditionally been construed as separate entities, we now may read and experience all of these diverse forms through a single screen-based device such as a computer or smart phone. In this course, we will examine the growing number of forms in which a cultural text (i.e. a book, an image, or a film) is expressed and how our understanding of such a text is shaped by its medium.
We will discuss the means by which digital and screen-based media are defined as “new” as well as the reasons and motivations behind this descriptor. To unpack the ways that “new” media shape texts, we will study the unique and shared properties of “old” forms such as print, photography, film, and television. We will explore the concept of medium specificity and its application to both “old” and “new” media in order to investigate the ways in which our modes of reading shift from text to text and from screen to screen.
This course is designed to help teachers develop strategies to guide students in turning a critical eye toward the devices, technologies, and screens that permeate their lives. This will be undertaken with the concurrent aim toward the practical, giving you a “toolbox” of methods, both for analysis of new media and its integration into the learning environment. Several required screenings will occur in conjunction with the class.
ENG 600: Writing Within (and Beyond) the Curriculum: Enabling Writers, Building Writing Collaborations (Parks)
Good writing is collaborative, speaks to important issues, connects with a larger community, and helps to foster productive dialogue. And for that very reason, good writing is very hard to teach. This is particularly the case when competing curricula, standards, values, and expectations permeate our classrooms and schools. Negotiating these expectations, while working to support the unique needs of our students, is tough work. “Writing Within (and Beyond) the Curriculum” begins with this difficult reality.
During our time at Minnowbrook, we will unpack the competing demands placed upon us as teachers who ask students to write. We will explore models of in-school and community collaborations which allow our students to draw together the different writing genres learned in classrooms into dialogue with larger communities—whether in the school or in the community. In doing so, we will look at poetic, personal, and research-based writing assignments. We will explore writing collaborations based on issues of race, class, and language rights.
Throughout, we will examine case studies where collaborative models were used in elementary, high school, and community contexts. By the end of our discussions, we should have a concrete sense of how to incorporate such strategies into our individual and collective classrooms. And hopefully, we will have established a community in which we support each other as we move to incorporate this work into our classrooms next fall.
ENG 670: Independent Study (Moody)
This independent study option offers participants the opportunity to design a course that best meets his or her own interests and needs. Participants may propose, for example, specific studies in critical theory, composition pedagogy, literary periods/genres/authors, curriculum work for the English and writing classroom, etc. The experience combines independent reading and writing, individual meetings between the participant and course facilitator, and discussion sessions in small groups with other workshop participants working on similar projects. Individual course plans must be approved by Dr. Patricia Moody prior to registration (1-3 credits).
NOTE: Participating teacher will also receive writing prompts, curricula, sample publications, and informational materials on how to produce local publications to use in their own classroom.
Our Faculty
Chris Hanson is an Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse University. He teaches courses in new media, television, digital games, genre, and media theory. Prior to joining the faculty at Syracuse, Hanson worked as a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and taught courses at Loyola Marymount University School of Film and Television in Los Angeles. He received his MA and Ph.D. in Critical Studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. Prior to USC, he worked in video game design, software development, and the production of educational content for PBS.
Patricia A. Moody is Associate Professor of English at Syracuse University. She has developed and taught courses in composition, grammar, rhetoric, and style; English language history and issues; linguistics; classroom pedagogy; and a wide range of courses in literature and literary theory. Moody has presented widely at conferences and has written book chapters and articles on the history of the English language, aspects of English in grammar and grammatical history, and medieval literature. She has authored a rhetoric and composition textbook, edited anthologies of critical theory, and produced extensive instructional materials. In 1996, she received the Chancellor’s Citation for Distinguished Service at Syracuse University.
Steve Parks is an Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Syracuse University, as well as Founder/Executive Director of New City Community Press. He has also taught in urban public schools, establishing a network of writing centers across six public schools in Philadelphia. As a member of SU’s Writing Program, he currently teaches and develops required composition courses, advanced writing seminars, and community writing-based projects. He has spent the last 10 years working with public school teachers across the country to develop public school/university partnerships designed to foster increased literacy skills among participants, work which is often featured in resulting publications designed for classroom use. Sample New City Community Press publications include Soul Talk: Urban Youth Poetry, FREEDOM! A Civic Dialogue, HOME: Journey’s into the Westside, and Working: An Anthology of Writing and Photography. Parks is author of Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love, Class Politics: The Movement for a Students’ Right To Their Own Language, and he is editor of numerous anthologies focused on literacy and education.
About Minnowbrook
Syracuse University’s Minnowbrook Conference Center is an enchanting facility built in the rustic elegance of the Adirondack “Great Camp” tradition.
Room accommodations are spacious and comfortable. They will be designated single occupancy, unless registration numbers require room sharing. All meals will be provided by the kitchen staff at Minnowbrook, as will snacks throughout the day. Meals are gourmet quality and participants are guaranteed to never go hungry!
Recreational facilities—including a game room, workout equipment, tennis court, canoes, kayaks, paddleboats, and rowboats—are available for participants, and of course, the Adirondacks themselves offer great opportunities for hiking and other outdoor sports.
For more details about the facility, visit www.minnowbrook.org.
Workshop Fees & Tuition
Participants have several registration options for the Special Topics workshops. They may register for one or two workshops for professional development experience only, or qualified participants may register for one or two workshops as graduate courses bearing credit.
The fee structure for these options—which includes room and board, use of the Minnowbrook facilities, workshop fees, and graduate credit if applicable—is as follows:
| One Workshop (no graduate credit) | $1,325 | |
| Two Workshops (no graduate credit) | $1,495 | |
| One Workshop (3 graduate credits*) | $1,535 | |
| Two Workshops (6 graduate credits*) | $1,915 |
* Includes the basic workshop fee plus tuition. Note: Graduate credit is optional, and this specially reduced tuition rate is available only to SUPA certified instructors. See directions on the Minnowbrook registration form for submitting the Graduate Credit Registration form, along with two separate payments: 1) the basic workshop fee and 2) the tuition amount.
Please note that in the event of low enrollment, individual workshops may be canceled.
Registration
To register for the Special Topics workshops, complete the application form and return it with your deposit ($75 for one workshop; $150 for two) by June 1, 2012 to:
Syracuse University Project Advance
400 Ostrom Avenue
Syracuse, NY 13244-3250
(315) 443-2404
FAX: (315) 443-1626
Testimonials
What past Minnowbrook participants have had to say about their experience:
“I can’t think of any situation where you have the opportunity to immerse yourself in not only a subject, but a place, that allows for the leisure to contemplate the world without distractions—a serenity that is very different from the hectic world of teaching in the high school in particular. This is the perfect time to lose yourself and do something that you love. Talking about books, talking about art, with people who have the same passion, the same interests, and so much experience to exchange.”
“During my free time, I spent a lot of time on the dock just listening to the water and reading for chunks of time. That’s one of the lures of Minnowbrook: time to think. And to read and to be uninterrupted. And to talk to people who are from all over, finding out what’s going on at other places.”
“Each of the years I’ve attended, I’ve come home with something I’ve been able to use directly in my classes and in my instruction. I’m getting materials and points of view that I didn’t have. The marriage of people from the high schools and Syracuse University in this particular program, which we’ve come to call an intellectual community, has the distinct advantage of giving us an opportunity to generalize our knowledge, to find out what things are like in other places, and to see what works in other places. It’s so refreshing: you come home and you have thought deeply about a variety of subjects and discussed them with a variety of very intelligent and very articulate and very well-read and informed people, and how can that be bad? It’s just a totally good time.”
“Well, first of all, the setting is so gorgeous. And you just feel at peace and relaxed. It becomes a very intense experience, because when you’re with a group of people and you’re in class with them for so many hours of the day, and then you sit down and have lunch with them, and you sit down at dinner with them, and you have breakfast with them, and you talk, continually, and the issues that come up in the class get hashed out again and again, new things get brought up over meals, and it’s just a very stimulating, and totally involving experience. And you come back very invigorated and with new ideas and ready to try new things.”
“The intellectual stimulation that you get here is incomparable. I mean you go to the faculty room and everybody complains about problems with the day-to-day routine, and you don’t get to discuss ideas at all or techniques that you would use in the classroom. Here, we talk about all kinds of things that we can try and that we’ve tried before that worked. It’s just a constant exchange of new ideas. It’s a totally new networking that is not normal in a high school room. Everybody here is just on an automatic cycle of exchange of ideas. And that’s what happens here all the time. Not just in a group meeting but while we’re on a hike up to Castle Rock or while we’re at dinner or after dinner.”
“This has some of the same benefits as any sort of camp provides. People get to come away. They get a retreat. And they come together with other people who are interested in the same issues, the same topic, the same inquiry, and they get to live, eat, breathe, and do this for however many hours of a day, so it’s a very short experience, but it’s a very intense experience. And the benefit comes not just from the content delivery, but from the kind of all-inclusive interaction. So there’s this constant flow of discussion, from one course to another, to issues in my school, to how am I going to do this unit of my course, and there’s this sort of seamless interaction for whatever period of time and that’s just remarkable. So you can call it camp but it’s a much more intense sort of professional interaction than any other venue I can imagine.”
“What brings me here? The opportunity to gain credit working with the Syracuse University program and the idea of it being concentrated in one week; other courses that I take are spread out over several months or they take up weekends and don’t feel as though they have the same continuity as they do here.”
