2024 Workshops

 ENG 600: Making a Scene: Reclaiming Student Attention Through Material Practice (Luther)

This course begins with the premise that social media has significantly altered the means, practices, and ultimately the value of attention. Pandemic-based instruction only accelerated this cultural shift in our schools as screen-based modes of instruction challenged teachers to find meaningful, sustainable ways to engage students online. In the pandemic’s wake, teachers are seeing unprecedented spikes in absenteeism, anxiety, and detachment — a displacement we have struggled to address since. This workshop will respond to these challenges by theorizing and developing pedagogical practice focused on creating a scene for student writing that emphasizes agency and engagement through iteration and generative failure. Participants will theorize mindfulness and attention via readings and discussion, compose in and with our surroundings at Blue Mountain Lake, and tinker with the material practice of writing by making zines – gritty DIY publications that we’ll circulate on-site and after our time together. This work will ultimately serve as a model for in-class pedagogy so that participants can better navigate student attention struggles.

 ENG 600: Generative Feedback & Revision as Creative Process (Kleinbart)

Exchanging feedback and revising for publication are essential steps in the creative process, and yet the study of these endeavors tends to get deprioritized in the writing classroom; they can seem abstract or intuitive, too complicated to teach. Indeed, the challenges of supplying apt, sensitive feedback and pushing through difficulties in our own writing can, at times, prove confounding. But there are concrete strategies that can help us hone our editorial skills, regain lost momentum, and foster more productive interactions with students. It’s useful to step back and ask: What is feedback really supposed to do, and when might it undermine our purposes? How do we navigate the ethical and emotional complexities involved in supplying truly visionary feedback? And how can we build generative and supportive workshopping competencies both in our classrooms and in our own workshopping circles? This seminar will focus on theoretical and practical approaches to generative feedback and revision. We’ll work to expand our shared workshopping vocabulary and experiment with creative approaches to revision that we can share with our students to help them reimagine new possibilities for developing drafts in progress. Time will be allotted for research and reflection on generative revision pedagogies for mentoring student writers. Writers and writing instructors are equally welcome; no prior experience is necessary.

2024 Faculty

Jason Luther

Ivy Kleinbart

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.

Workshop Fees & Tuition

Participants have several registration options for the Special Topics workshops. Most register for one workshop only. Graduate credit is optional, and this specially reduced tuition rate ($210 for 3 credit hours) is available only to SUPA certified instructors. 

The fee structure for the workshop- only option—which includes room and board, use of the Minnowbrook facilities and workshop fees, is $1,595 ($75 deposit due by June 21, 2024).

(If you are interested in taking both workshops, please contact Sean Conrey at smconrey@syr.edu)

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 by June 28, 2024 to:

Syracuse University Project Advance
400 Ostrom Avenue
Syracuse, NY 13244-3250
315.443.2404
315.443.1626

Testimonials

What do past Minnowbrook participants 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.”