FEATURED WORKSHOPS & SPECIAL EVENTS—Summer EAST
PLEASE NOTE: Workshops will continue to be updated.
Information on Institute faculty and workshop leaders can be found on Summer EAST Faculty page
Institute BBQ on the Lake
A celebratory evening BBQ on the shores of Lake Champlain, catered by the Inn at Shelburne Farms.
Instructional Best Practice for Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: Instructional Best Practices for Service-Learning—designed to create common language and understanding around the use of service-learning as a teaching strategy. The Best Practices form a core part of our work, helping educators (and students) plan, extend, and reflect upon service-learning activities and projects. The Best Practices will also be useful as a way to talk about service-learning within your own institution.
with Joe Brooks and Pat Haggerty
Site-Level Best Practice for Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: The Site Level Best Practices have helped educators, administrators, community partners, and students support long term service-learning efforts for more than a decade. Faculty will offer their own insights and explore practical needs and considerations encountered on the road to supporting and institutionalizing service-learning.
with Joe Brooks and Pat Haggerty
Traveling the Path to Intentional Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: This workshop will take us inside one teacher’s journey into the world of service-learning, place-based education, and sustainability. Our focus will be on what it was like getting started, beginning to forge community relationships, and working to create student and teacher engagement and buy-in. Along the way we will encounter a host of other surprises, both positive and negative with Peter candidly sharing his successes and willingness to fail along the way.
with Peter McConville
Encountering Sustainability, Discovering Shelburne Farms
DESCRIPTION: This hands-on field trip will serve as the backdrop for beginning your own investigation into the relationship between service-learning and Sustainability. In the simplest terms, Sustainability is "meeting the needs of today without compromising the ability of future generations to do so." With the goals of Sustainability as a motivating force, service-learning provides an ideal strategy for students to become invested in caring for their own communities. During the field trip we will delve into Sustainability's "3 E's" (Environmental Integrity, Economic Vitality, and Social Equity) in a variety of ways. This field trip will help participants begin the Institute with an understanding of the connection between service-learning, Sustainability, and education.
with Emily Hoyler
Innovation in Higher Ed/K-12 Partnerships
DESCRIPTION: When you think about partnerships between higher education and K-12 schools, chances are things like mentoring and student teaching come to mind. How about college students and middle school students working together to map community assets, or online mentorship to encourage creative writing? This workshop will help you to think beyond traditional paradigms to explore new ways in which these educational institutions might collaborate through service-learning. Facilitators will share a select number of examples of innovative partnerships, followed by the opportunity for participants to explore, discuss, and brainstorm ideas they might consider implementing in their own settings. We will also explore possible challenges, offering ideas to each other as to how to overcome them.
Effective Student Voice in a Classroom and the Implications for Learning
DESCRIPTION: This workshop brings veteran teacher Mary Whalen's first hand experience and professional passion to the question of how we create and nurture meaningful student voice within the constraints of a typical classroom and school. Amid a backdrop of actual project based experiences in the classroom, participants will hear one teacher's candid reflections and specific suggestions. Participants will also be offered a contiuum of possibile entry points for creating a pedagogical foundation that supports real student voice within the curriculum. Schools are the foundation of our democracy. Service-learning experiences that encourage genuine student voice also create opportunities for leadership. In doing so we increase student engagement, ownership, and ultimately learning outcomes. In this workshop, we will also look at Participatory Action Research as a tool for elevating student voice, its role in "problem-based learning" along wiith some of the dilemmas that this work raises.
with Mary Whalen
Thinking Forward: Meeting the Challenges that Lie Ahead
DESCRIPTION: We will use the collective thinking and experience of the full group to think long term—identifying and problem solving potential roadblocks, unexpected changes, and unforeseen “landscape alterations” that can affect the well being of even the most successful projects and programs.
with Joe Brooks and Pat Haggerty
Preserving Community Through Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: Good place-based curriculum develops academic skills, preserves community heritage and contributes to the economic revitalization of the community. When a local community economic redevelopment organization in Vermont needed help in their attempts to preserve the Guilford Country Store, the 7th and 8th graders at Guilford Central School stepped up to the plate. They developed storyboards, photoshopped historical photos, interviewed seniors and past store owners, learned camera technology and audio recording, and mastered editing software in their creation of a refined 17 minute documentary about the value of turning the store into a community center. The movie is now the lynchpin of the fundraising effort to save the store. Inspired curriculum can truly serve a social purpose.
with Jen Kramer
Service-Learning and Assessment
DESCRIPTION: Assessment is about observing how our students are doing and providing feedback and support so that they can do better. Involving students in the assessment process helps them understand how and why they learn. In this workshop, we’ll look at some techniques for aligning assessment with learning goals in service-learning practice, including deepening the connection between journal writing and service and aligning curricular goals with service and assessment using Connecting Service-Learning to the Curriculum. This workshop begins with a quick resource review. We then look at some powerful assessment models collected by a national study group on service-learning and assessment. The workshop concludes with a lively discussion of how assessing what students learn through service fits into the larger goals of education for Sustainability, and how the reason for learning becomes a powerful motivator for student achievement. We encourage you to bring your questions and dilemmas about assessment for group discussion.
with Pat Haggerty
Connecting Students to their Future Through Service-Learning
DESCRIPTION: Sustainability provides an integrative concept for service-learning that helps build participants' skills, knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs with the goal of creating a better future. Embedded in education for sustainability is a process that is integrative and participatory and that uses long-term thinking to meet curriculum and service goals similar to the best practices of service-learning. In this workshop we will explore this integrative process and how it can deeply enrich service-learning experiences for both teachers and students.
with Emily Hoyler
Connecting School Based Gardens and Greenhouses
to Service-Learning Projects, Curriculum, and Community.
DESCRIPTION: School based agricultural education is on the rise. In this presentation Steve will discuss the many service projects that can be done using both school based gardens as well as greenhouses. These outdoor classrooms provide a perfect environment for providing the hands-on learner a real connection to science, math, health, and english curriculums. Steve will share how he uses Instructional Best Practices in service projects, along with his involvement in a grant using the Learning Kitchen, a six week program teaching students about nutrition and cooking. He will make connections to nutrition and the local food movement. Steve will also discuss his successes and challenges with these projects as well as managing gardens and greenhouse throughout the school year.
with Steven Colangeli
Reflection: An Essential Ingredient for Learning
DESCRIPTION: Take a look at how reflection can become the guiding force behind service-learning and how it deepens understanding. Learn and practice a variety of strategies and techniques with veteran service-learning practitioners. Discuss spiral reflection. Engage in the popcorn method, a refection collage, image journaling, and scrapbook documentation. Take a look at how reflection can be based on the multiple intelligences.
with Pat Haggerty
Place-Based Education: Making School More Like a Farmer’s Market
A Conversation with David Sobel
DESC
RIPTION: The landscape of schooling has begun to look like the sprawl of America. Generic textbooks designed for the big markets of California and Texas provide the same homogenized, unhealthy diet as all those fast food places on the strip. Educational biodiversity falls prey to the bulldozers of standardization. What is nearby has become parochial and insignificant. Place-based education is a response to the alienation of schools from community, and the decoupling of schools from historic sites, local landscapes, and farms. Instead, we need schools organized around the principles of the farmers' market, drawing on the resources and variety of the local community. with David Sobel
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Summer EAST Institute Faculty • Workshops may be updated. Check back often.
