Students having a conversation on the Ripton campus

You are a teacher. A student. A reader. A writer. You are ready to become even more. Earn your master’s at Bread Loaf School of English.

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Bread Loaf School of English is an intensive summer master’s and continuing education program for teachers and other professionals. Since 1920, students have experienced how Bread Loaf can transform their teaching, their career, and themselves.

Color Tinted photo of faculty and students participating in the theatre during Bread Loaf School of English

What Makes Us Different

You are empowered.

Earn a Master of Arts or Master of Letters over four or five summers, or pursue continuing graduate education over one or more summers. You’ll encounter new texts and ideas with world-renowned faculty and emerge re-energized and ready to read, write, perform, teach, and interpret the world in revolutionary ways.

Explore Our Programs

You are immersed.

Join a community of innovative thinkers and teachers in vigorous full-time graduate study. Engage meaningfully with peers and faculty who are dedicated to transforming texts into thoughts and actions.

You are inspired.

Think across disciplinary boundaries. Nowhere other than Bread Loaf can you be part of a master’s program that connects English, American, and world literatures with creative writing, pedagogy, and theater arts.

Are you ready?

Our Locations

Each summer, you’ll discover a new community and culture at one of our distinct campus locations.

Color tinted image of the Inn at Bread Loaf.

Ripton, Vermont

at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf Mountain Campus

  • 250 students
  • Located in the Green Mountain National Forest
  • Home to the Bread Loaf Acting Ensemble, integrated into daily classes and life
  • A full-scale letterpress operation with on-site master printers
  • Access to the Middlebury College resources

Explore Bread Loaf/Vermont

Oxford Bread Loaf Campus

Oxford, England

at Lincoln College, University of Oxford

  • 65 - 75 students
  • Centrally located within the city and University of Oxford
  • Extensive independent research
  • Access to the Bodleian Library
  • Excursions to London and Stratford theaters, and to nearby country houses and museums

Explore Bread Loaf/Oxford

Water crashing against rocks on the beach in Monterey, CA

Monterey, California

at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies

  • 45 - 50 students
  • Located on the California coast
  • Interdisciplinary approach to global cultures and concepts
  • Innovative three-week session, structured around small-group tutorials
  • Uniquely intensive and immersive

Explore Bread Loaf/California

Why Bread Loaf?

Immerse yourself in rigorous and imaginative graduate study.

Speaker 1:

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across a passage in the

classroom with my students that I had just read the summer before at

Bread Loaf. And in those moments, it’s not that you feel that you know

the answer, it’s that you’re ready to ask, because of your time at Bread

Loaf, better questions.

 

Speaker 2:

This is a really special program because I get to come for five

summers. I get to choose different campuses as well, and I get to take

a Masters by taking really creative courses, ranging from Mexican

American Lit.

 

Speaker 3:

Robert Frost’s Poetry.

 

Speaker 4:

The Literature of War.

 

Speaker 5:

Freud’s Theory of the Unconscious.

 

Speaker 6:

Describing the Imagination.

 

Speaker 7:

Hip hop as Social Justice Text.

 

Speaker 8:

Playwriting and fiction writing.

 

Speaker 7:

Learning happens on a lot of levels here. It happens first of all in the

classroom.

 

Speaker 6:

We sit in circles, we collaborate, we deliberate and we arrive at

positions.

 

Speaker 9:

It happens in sort of more discreet ways when you’re continuing the

conversation you had in the classroom while you walk to dinner.

 

Speaker 10:

Maybe watching a theater rehearsal.

 

Speaker 6:

In communities, like the Bread Loaf teacher network.

 

Speaker 1:

At meals, on porches, it happens everywhere on the mountain.

 

Speaker 3:

Even over bocce the barbs and the banter is literary in focus.

 

Speaker 3:

Every member of this community is a character, in a sense, playing a

role in a text of the summer.

 

Speaker 5:

It’s a group of people who all love literature, who are all deeply

invested in the kinds of questions that are provoked from this

literature.

 

Speaker 2:

The majority of the people here are teachers, so there’s a shared

passion for education, for learning and for the future.

 

Speaker 9:

It’s an incredibly thoughtful, empathic, intelligent and inclusive

community.

 

Speaker 7:

If we talk to each other and become friends, we start to see, well,

here’s what’s possible.

 

Speaker 11:

I would like to get your own sense of whether you felt as you read the

last two books, is there a kind of falling off?

 

Speaker 2:

Nature is its own character here on the campus.

 

Speaker 3:

You see the literature as you read it.

 

Speaker 4:

Not only is it stunningly beautiful, it’s the most intellectually vigorous

space I’ve ever existed in.

 

Speaker 3:

There aren’t very many places in the world where you can find yourself

standing in the lunch line behind a Pulitzer prize winner and there

definitely aren’t very many places where you share the same

community as those people and you’re involved in the exact same

endeavor as them.

 

Speaker 2:

And they challenge us every single day to look at texts with new lenses

and think critically and go beyond whatever we thought was deep.

 

Speaker 9:

In a way that I think leads to a lot of really productive discomfort that

then pushes you to a better level of understanding.

 

Speaker 7:

It really asks us all here to step it up and to try on the clothes of

academics. So I think really at Bread Loaf you learn a sort of pedagogy

of confidence.

 

Speaker 12:

Flex foot cheetahs flying around the track, 400 meters. I really wanted

to play with the rhythm and the sound of that.

 

Speaker 13:

I think he wants to absolutely pull her back and he says it in the scene,

“Repent, confess, save yourself.”

 

Speaker 14:

And remember what peace there may be in hunger. It is still a beautiful

world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

 

Speaker 9:

The connectivity that Bread Loaf allows is sort of endless.

 

Speaker 3:

These conversations both about the texts but about the teaching of the

texts continue on and it’s an official thing. It’s a thing that Bread Loaf cares about and fosters with things like the Bread Loaf teachers’

network…

 

Speaker 9:

… which is a digitized universe primarily for teachers to connect both

locally, globally…

 

Speaker 2:

And we’re encouraged to do exchanges, to work together to connect

our students.

 

Speaker 6:

And they inspire one another throughout the year.

 

Speaker 2:

Contrary to other places, what happens at Bread Loaf does not stay at

Bread Loaf.

 

Speaker 1:

When I think of who will benefit from my time at Bread Loaf, I think of

my students in Hong Kong whose first experiences with America is

through the literature that I’ve studied here.

 

Speaker 7:

My colleagues with whom I’m designing a curriculum called food

literacy.

 

Speaker 10:

That student who sits afraid in class because they’re not sure how their

words will be accepted.

 

Speaker 6:

Students and teachers in the middle school in Kenya.

 

Speaker 2:

Recent immigrants getting started in the race toward the American

dream.

 

Speaker 15:

I now gladly behold though but his utmost skirts of glory.

 

Speaker 7:

The learning happens in the classroom. It spills over into the lunch

conversations or dinner conversations. Then it follows us home. We

hear the echo of it in our classrooms and in what we do, and I think it

raises the bar for us as teachers and as people, and it seems like

something that’s worth giving things up in order to be here for.

 

Students gather in the Little Theatre on the Ripton Campus to make Introductions

Bread Loaf Teacher Network

Bread Loaf Teacher Network (BLTN) connects educators internationally and year-round as they develop classroom and community projects based on their Bread Loaf studies. Just as educator practices are informed by the collaborative and democratic network, young people learning with BLTN teachers often become resources and advocates for equity and excellence.

Explore BLTN

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