Most importantly, the workshop will explore a number of approaches and practices for working with the poems themselves through writing, reading aloud, and collaborative performance. The aim is to enter the sometimes exotic territory of the poem in such a way that the experience is appropriately active, contemplative, exhilarating, and evocative. This workshop provides a retreat where teachers reflect on the way they teach writing. The sessions focus on such topics as reading and writing connections, invention strategies, coaching the writing process, and revision. Because teachers often work alone, without the support of a vital learning community, and often have little opportunity to write, in or out of the classroom, the workshop is communal and collaborative.
Teachers write together, exchange ideas with one another, and respond to one another's works.
Through these activities they become more aware of the composing process and students' struggles to acquire the ability to produce expressive, well-developed, and engaged writing. This workshop presents inventive writing strategies that help students gain a better understanding of complex ideas, historical documents, literary texts, and mathematical problems. Working together on relevant texts, teachers experiment with the use of student journals and classroom writing assignments to stimulate engagement with the language, ideas, and issues relevant to the subjects they teach. Writing to Learn does not focus on finished pieces of writing, but on ways to use writing to develop understanding, as a first step toward writing finished literary texts, essays, critical analyses, or research papers. We're drawn to nature and to reading about it out of a desire to reconnect with something antecedent to ourselves and the world we have constructed.