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