30th Annual Teaching & Writing Retreat: Slow Teaching
Tuesday and Wednesday, August 22 & 23
Mountain Top Inn & Resort, Chittenden, Vermont
Registration Now Open

Slow Teaching: What can you do to have students commit to learning?

What kinds of discussions, presentations, research work and writing are you engaging students with to dig deeper into the subject at-hand? How do you measure student results? What are some questions and challenges you wish to share about your work with students?

Slow teaching is a practice and a political movement. The Slow Teaching movement grows from the slow food movement, which focuses on the importance of work-life balance (stress), challenges the industrialization and mass production of food with local solutions, and is a call to action that challenges corporate culture. These characteristics inform slow teaching whose principles and professional practices, say Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber, in The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, are ways “to alleviate work stress, preserve humanistic education, and resist the corporate university.”

We wish to inspire conversations about engaging students and each other; we wish to understand the challenges we face given the current context of higher education, balancing the local and the national, the political and the personal, and our institution’s goals with our individual visions as educators.

The retreat will feature plenary sessions on our theme as well as smaller workshops that will offer approaches to advance our students’ ability to write well, think creatively and critically, and safely navigate challenging ideas and perspectives.

More information about the retreat will be forthcoming; if you would like to register, you may do so using this link: http://sites.middlebury.edu/teachingandwriting/registration/