The Winter Institute

Reading across Difference

Bread Loaf Campus, Ripton, Vermont

February 21-23, 2025   

The Bread Loaf Winter Institute is a weekend professional development opportunity led by renowned Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English (BLSE) faculty.

Deepen your teaching practice while earning meaningful professional development hours along with other passionate educators. For over a century, BLSE has been offering innovative, graduate-level curricula ideal for teachers of English and language arts. The program’s powerful impact on K–12 classrooms has been bolstered by the Bread Loaf Teacher Network (BLTN), a nationally visible network of teachers and youth who engage imaginative literacy practices to foster social justice.

The 2025 BLSE Winter Institute is being supported by grant funding from the Katherine Wasserman Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation. 

Cost: $1,050 with on-campus housing, $880 without housing

Weekend Offerings

Institute workshops and special sessions will provide participants an opportunity to explore literary texts, periods, and genres as well as the theoretical, pedagogical, historical, and community frames that help us read across difference(s). 

Full-Group Sessions

Faculty Roundtable & Discussion

Curricular Brainstorming

Theater and Dance Exercises

Reading the World through Film: Youth Filmmakers, Research, and Social Action

Led by Tom McKenna 
Director, BLTN Next Generation Youth Leadership Network; Communications Director, BLTN

Final Debrief: Reflecting on What We’ve Learned

Led by Beverly Moss 
Professor of English and Director of Second-Year Writing, The Ohio State University; Director, BLTN

Workshops

Worlds of Difference: Teaching Utopia and Imagining Hope through Olive Schreiner’s Dreams

Led by Barbara Black
Professor of English and Tisch Chair in Arts and Letters, Skidmore College

Using the Anglo-South African text Dreams as our case study, this workshop turns to utopian fiction and its interest in reimagining the world through thoughtful experimentation. Utopia asks: what if? Can we imagine the world differently? Our interests will be several: the joys of both close reading and attentiveness to historical, cultural difference; traversing both time and the globe to explore an unfamiliar past as a resource for the present; and the liberatory power of the imagination to guide a pedagogy dedicated to resilience.

Reading Communities through Community Literacy Narratives

Led by Beverly Moss 
Professor of English and Director of Second-Year Writing, The Ohio State University; Director, BLTN

This workshop will focus on designing research and writing projects that ask students to identify, document, and contextualize literacy practices in their community spaces. It will explore ways to engage students in primary and secondary research and will underscore the value of literacies that occur within the community.

Culturally Responsive Reading

Led by David Wandera 
Associate Professor of Special Education, Language, and Literacy, The College of New Jersey

Through a critical reading of explicit and implicit instantiations of language, identity, space, and time in children’s stories, this workshop will illustrate approaches to foregrounding a work’s cultural aspects to enable participants to explore the contextuality of literature and to think reflexively and compassionately about the world.

Teaching with Water and Poetry

Led by Bob Sullivan
Contributing Editor, A Public Space

We will look at what poetry and poets can tell us about where we live and how we live there. We’ll explore watersheds and poetry that helps us look at water and place, and we’ll do so with an eye to the ways that water crosses various boundaries that might otherwise sort and separate us.

Stylin’ and Profilin’: A Lesson on Genre from Zora Neale Hurston

Led by Michelle Bachelor Robinson 
Professor of English, Director of Comprehensive Writing, Spelman College

Using a chapter from Zora Neale Hurston’s autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road as a model text, the workshop will explore using the same text to explore journalistic genres of writing: the profile and the proposal. The workshop will cover in detail, scope and sequence of the unit, lesson planning, profile writing, revision, and proposal writing.

Reading Race and Historical Difference

Led by Lyndon Dominique
Associate Professor of English, Lehigh University; Director, BLSE

Late 18th century British literature contains some strategic depictions of young black people promoting antiracist and antislavery causes. Can these popular racial figures be of use today? Looking at poetry by William Blake, Amelia Opie and Phillis Wheatley, this workshop takes up two challenges: reading race across historical difference and inspiring young readers to think about how they might utilize this unique British connection between youth agency and social justice.

Shakespeare: Ability, Race, and Gender

Led by Emily Bartels
Professor of English, Rutgers University; Dean, BLSE

How do Shakespeare’s plays invite us to experience differences – in ability, race, and gender? What happens as the plays theatricalize and personalize constructions of bias? Focusing on examples from Richard III, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello, we will use performance-based pedagogies to explore what difference not only is but also does in Shakespeare, with the aim of expanding the assumptions and approaches we bring to the question.

Adaptation: Teaching the Significance of Gradual Change

Led by Amy Rodgers
Associate Professor of Film, Media, and Theatre and Dean for the Senior Class, Mount Holyoke College

Often we think about social change as something that occurs via radical irruption (sedition, rebellion, or war). However, most social movements develop gradually and incrementally. How can we use literature (and other narrative forms) as a model for teaching our students the value and potency of gradual change and a means of developing resiliency in the face of enormous social, political, and environmental upheaval?

Additional Information

• Each participant will take two different workshops.
• The Institute will feature a series of brainstorming sessions that will allow you to reimagine your own curricula in light of what you learn across the weekend. We ask all participants to bring a text, lesson or unit plan that you’d like to workshop with Institute peers.
• The institute will be held on the historic Bread Loaf campus in Ripton, Vermont, in the Green Mountain National Forest.
• The event includes opportunities to come early or stay late for cross-country skiing at the Rikert Outdoor Center (on the Bread Loaf campus) and downhill skiing at the Middlebury Snowbowl (minutes away); discounted tickets are available.  

What to Expect

• Faculty Roundtable
• Workshops
• Interactive Performance-Based Exercises
• Presentation of Youth-Led Community-Based Learning
• Group Writing and Sharing Sessions