High School Education

At the Bread Loaf School of English (BLSE), we have completed our third year of a Conflict Transformation-inspired curriculum: Teaching, Writing, and Acting for Change. The “Change” courses put storytelling at the center of the process of understanding and promoting positive social change. Teachers take these new tools back to their classrooms, sharing their learning with hundreds of students. Summer 2025 courses were Teaching Literacies across Difference; Race, Rhetoric, and the Literature of Protest; Solo Performance; and Zora Neale Hurston: Anthropologist, Folklorist, Novelist, Change Agent.

Through these courses, Change Action Grants for teachers, and new investment in our teacher (BLTN) and youth (NextGen) networks, we seek to equip high school students with civic skills to understand and address the conflicts that arise in a diverse society.

SELECT PROJECTS IN 2025: 

Project: Winter Institute 2025

Highlight: BLSE held its second Winter Institute in February 2025, under the theme of “Reading Across Difference.”  A team of BLSE faculty and actors engaged with a dynamic cohort of K-12 educators to model, explore, and invent culturally-informed reading and teaching practices that participants could adapt to their own classrooms. Spirits and imaginations soared!. Learn more here.

Project: A Year with the BLTN Next Generation Leadership Network

Highlight: Conflict Transformation investment in the BLTN NextGen Leadership Network (BLTN NextGen) allowed youth to connect in person in Louisville, Atlanta, Santa Fe, and Vermont, and to network online to share their local social action work. Read more about the activities of the network in the 2024-25 school year. 

Project: What’s the Story Film Showcase 

Highlight: In July 2024 and 2025 members of What’s the Story? The Young Filmmakers’ Social Action team convened on the Bread Loaf Vermont campus to showcase their documentary films created through their participation in the longstanding BLTN program. These events draw an audience of teachers and community members. Read more about What’s the Story? here, and about the 2025 film showcase here. 

Project: Teaching, Writing, and Acting for Change Fellows at BLSE

Highlight: Once again in 2025, Bread Loaf provided fellowships to support public and private school teachers with commitments to making positive change through learning across difference at Bread Loaf and in their teaching.  Meet the twelve Fellows for 2025-26, hailing from Maine to Georgia to New Mexico.