BLTN Teachers

I Live Here: A Reflective Artifact Project

Kim Masterson teaches at Salem High School in Salem, MA. She graduated from Bread Loaf’s Asheville campus in 2007, where she worked for three years as a Director’s Assistant. This summer, Kim will be working at the Vermont campus in the same capacity. Kim credits Professor Tilly Warnock’s Bread Loaf course, “Rewriting a Life: Teaching

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In this inaugural issue, we feature articles and media from the classrooms of Bread Loaf Teacher Network teachers Brent Peters, Jineyda Tapia, Chris Moore, Andrea Vescelius, Hayley Strandberg, Lorena German, and Holly Spinelli. We are proud to frame the work of these innovative teachers with context from  Emily Bartels, Director of the Bread Loaf School of English, as well as tributes to the vision of former director Jim Maddox, and former Director of Telecommunications, Rocky Gooch. Through the decades of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network's evolution, participating teachers have connected their students in interactive written dialogue. Professor Shirley Brice Heath's article, "Talking Writing," explores talk as a foundational experience connecting home, school, and intellectual development. This issue also highlights developments at Bread Loaf's campuses inspired by the work of the BLTN:  the visit to Bread Loaf by Karen Cator, Director of the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Education Technology, a partnership with the Santa Fe Indian School, the development of writing centers at each Bread Loaf campus, and the enduring and innovative work of Andover Bread Loaf.

The Bread Loaf Teacher Network digital journal, published semi-annually,  is made possible by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. This issue is co-edited by Tom McKenna, BLTN Director of Communications, and Eric Eye, BLTN - Ohio, with help from Bread Loaf Teacher Network Magazine editor, Chris Benson. Bread Loaf Teacher Network Director Dixie Goswami provides the guiding vision for the network and its digital initiatives. Contact Dixie Goswami or Tom McKenna for more information or to submit content for upcoming issues.

Of the many things that make the Bread Loaf School of English unique is the fact that, for anyone who is interested, it comes with a highly dynamic professional development network: the Bread Loaf Teacher Network. Nowhere else that I know is graduate study in English linked to teacher practice and research in a way that does not merely trickle down into K-12 classrooms but also, rather, transforms them. And nowhere else is the reciprocal effect so potent. BLTN teachers not only incorporate what they are learning in Bread Loaf classes about Shakespeare, Toni Morrison, Simon Ortiz, Italo Calvino into their own pedagogies; they bring their pedagogical visions to bear on Shakespeare, Morrison, Ortiz, Calvino, asking questions from a teacher’s as well as scholar’s point of view, with the goal of bringing both texts and teaching to life in compelling and original ways. If at Bread Loaf literature is the food of love, teaching is the music: at Bread Loaf, students write, read, perform, imagine, and teach their ways through texts. As the publications in this journal will show, the Bread Loaf Teacher Network provides a structure for innovative teacher-research and practice in K-12 schools across the country; BLTN also provides a prompt for innovative graduate study at Bread Loaf. What is Bread Loaf to BLTN, BLTN to Bread Loaf? Everything. Emily C. Bartels Director, BLSE

BLTN Teachers

• Teach Lawrence: Transforming Education, Transforming a City
• BLTN Bibliography: A Growing Resource
• The Case For Food Literacy
• Why BLTN?: Members Weigh In on Connected Teaching
• Interpretive Communities: Hayley Strandberg Takes Bread Loaf Class to Her Students