Seminars 2024-25

In this three-day seminar you will be introduced to various kinds of prints and will learn how to use the new, easy to use and clean water-soluble inks (AKUA) in your classrooms. Printmaking is a marvelous introduction to other art forms as it stimulates both creative and analytical problem solving. We will start with trace monotypes, and move on through stencils and viscosity monotype, to exploring various ways to achieve variety and texture by making collographs. I emphasize experimentation and encourage investigation of personal imagery. Please note that even if you don’t have access to a press in your classrooms, you will learn techniques that can be used without equipment. Teachers of all subjects and grade levels are welcomed and encouraged to enroll. The seminar will be conducted in Randy’s Somerville Mix-It Studio in Davis Square. 

Randy Garber, Artist
Location: Mix-It Studio, Somerville
Dates: October 29, November 1, November 7, 2024; 9:30am-3pm.

RANDY GARBER’s art practice is divided between her studio in Somerville, MA and the Mixit Print Studio also in Somerville, MA. She teaches printmaking at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and is a recipient of many artist awards and grants including a 2023 Fellowship Award in printmaking from the Mass Cultural Council, the Traveling Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, and awards from the Puffin Foundation, St. Botolph Foundation, and Somerville Artists Grants. Randy’s work can be found in museum, corporate, and private collections including The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the DeCordova Museum, the Boston Athenaeum, The Boston Public Library, the Children’s Hospital, Karp Cancer Research Building, and the Governor Baxter School for the Deaf in Portland, ME. Recent solo and group exhibitions of her work include the Currier Art Museum, Lesley University, Simmons College, Sage College of Albany, DeCordova Museum, Boston Convention Center, and the Dishman Art Museum in Beaumont, Texas. Visit her website at: www.Randygarber.com.

This three-day seminar offers an intimate look at theater-in-action at Boston’s leading professional company. Through discussions with the artists and artisans responsible for producing, designing and managing a full-scale production, participants will gain valuable insight into the theatrical process. Participants will attend three matinee productions, all at the Huntington Theatre: 

1. Sojourners, November 22, 2024. Rising star playwright Mfoniso Udofia launches her sweeping cycle with a family’s origin story. Marriage, migration, and the pursuit of education collide when a young and brilliant Nigerian couple arrives in Houston, looking to earn their degrees and bring insights back to their home country. But when Abasiama discovers that her husband has been seduced by Motown records and American culture, she has to choose between the Nigerian Dream and her obligations as a matriarch. Director Dawn M. Simmons helms the lively and funny Sojourners at the historic Huntington Theatre following her acclaimed production of K-I-S-S-I-N-G at the Calderwood Pavilion.
2. Triumph of Love, April 3, 2025. Love takes center stage in this uproarious classic French comedy by 18th century playwright Pierre Carlet de Marivaux. A clever princess is smitten at first sight – but to win her prince, she must woo him in disguise. Mistaken identities, hilarious complications and deeply felt desire collide head on with Rationalist Philosophy – and surprising romantic entanglements ensue! Artistic Director Loretta Greco stages Stephen Wadsworth’s magnificent adaptation which inspired a passion for Marivaux in America anew.
3. Don’t Eat the Mangos, April 17, 2025. Playwright Ricardo Pérez González’s wickedly funny tragedy Don’t Eat the Mangos portrays life on his home island of Puerto Rico with compassion and humor through the saga of three sisters living just outside San Juan. As a hurricane approaches the beautiful island, secrets and ugly truths are revealed that cause the sisters to wrestle with how to stay true to their familia and homeland – and seek a satisfying revenge. Obie Award winner David Mendizábal returns from the acclaimed world premiere production to direct. Don’t Eat the Mangos won the 2021 Will Glickman Award for Best Play. 

Marisa Jones, Huntington Theatre Co.
Dates: November 22, 2024, April 3, 2025, and April 17, 2025
Location: The Huntington Theatre and the Calderwood Pavilion, Boston.

NOTE: We ask participants to attend at least two of the three days of this seminar.

MARISA JONES: With a B.F.A. from Emerson College and Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Marisa Jones joined the Education Department at the Huntington Theatre Company in 2002. As a long-standing member of the Huntington’s Department of Education, Marisa facilitates and manages multiple programs while serving as a director, writer and teaching artist. Marisa currently serves as the department’s Associate Director of Education and Practical Learning.

In this class, we will use design principles, intuition, choices about scale, texture, and detail for emphasis and storytelling. Collage is both an accessible art form and sophisticated design practice; personal and pre-eminently modern, it grabs materials from the rush of daily life.  “What is around you” becomes your materials and even your subject, while making choices to express a meaning.   We will consider the use of text as part of a design or work of art, whether your own writing or another’s.  Materials will be provided, and you can also bring your own. Exploring the materials of collage includes different kinds of adhesives and mediums, cutting tools, and resources.  Also, we’ll share – explaining our intentions can expand our ideas and incorporate narrative into our images. The course will include discussion about using collage as part of curriculum, and also a brief slide show about collage in art history.

Laurie Sheffield, Artist
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: December 2 & 10, 2024; 9:30am-3pm.

Laurie Sheffield is a printmaker, painter and collage artist, focused on landscape, close observation, painterly gesture, and creating narratives through imagery.  She earned her BFA and BA at Cornell University in printmaking, painting and English literature, and her MAT at Simmons College. She has done advanced work at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston University, Massachusetts College of Art, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and is part of an online collage community through the South Shore Art Center.  Laurie is an artist member of Shepherd & Maudsleigh printmaking studio in West Newton. After teaching English in the Brookline Public Schools for many years, Laurie now teaches monotype workshops and classes at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education. Her work has been shown at CCAE, the Cambridge Art Association, the Nave Gallery in Somerville, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, South Shore Art Center,  the Brickbottom Artists Building, and Newton Open Studios.

What happens when we gather before a work of art? How do we view and understand it? This two-day seminar for teachers of all subjects and ages, held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, will introduce participants to the Museum’s learner-centered approach to teaching visual art. Participants will learn about and practice Visual Thinking Strategies, a research-based method for facilitating discussions that make art accessible to all students and allow their ideas and perspectives to take center stage. We will reflect on the benefits of using Visual Thinking Strategies in the classroom across disciplines and grade levels. Learning will take place primarily in the galleries. Teachers of all subjects and grade levels are encouraged to enroll, no prior experience with art is required.

Sara Egan, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Location: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
Dates: December 4 & 9, 2024; 9:30am-3pm.

SARA EGAN is a museum educator whose work is grounded in constructivism and the use of discussions about works of art to affirm all voices. She connects Boston students and teachers with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum as the Associate Curator of Education. Sara holds a B.A. from Vassar College and an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is an Adjunct Professor of Art at Simmons College

The long and durable musical career of the Rolling Stones spans almost the entire history of rock and roll. Making their recording début in 1963 with their single “Come On,” a Chuck Berry cover, the Stones were catalysts in the important British blues revival of the early 1960s, and along with the Beatles, Animals, Who, Kinks, and Yardbirds spearheaded the British pop music invasion of the 1960s. The group has now played over 2,500 shows, reaching over 50 million fans. For over 60 years, and with a body of music amounting to over 400 songs, they have sustained an impact that has been musically influential, culturally powerful, and economically crucial to the development of virtually all aspects of the massive rock music industry. Adapting to and in many cases anticipating new (or retro) trends in popular music during their long career – rock, folk, psychedelic, funk, punk, reggae, disco, and others – the Stones nevertheless remained true to the fundamental stylistic roots and sound of rock and roll: R&B, country, and most of all, the blues, to which their indebtedness is reverential. Their amalgamation of these styles into an individual, highly distinctive, roots- and riff-based sound, along with their trademark subversive attitude (no less influential than their music), skillfully mediated the commercial and poetic boundaries of popular music. As a result, the Stones are both a barometer of rock aesthetics and a guide to its culture over the last half-century. 

This course will provide an in-depth examination of the Stones and their role within the evolving history of popular culture, with the major emphasis placed on understanding their musical styles through live demonstrations, tracing influences, understanding landmark recordings, contemporary events, analyzing film, and perhaps the most interesting development – their revival after 1989 and the creation of a new platform for curating their long history. The course will offer a way to understand an extremely varied musical repertory whose origins begin in the 1930s and place it within the now-long history of rock.

Victor Coelho, Boston University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: January 9 & 16, 2025; 9:30am-3pm.

VICTOR COELHO is Professor of Music in the Dept. of Musicology and Ethnomusicology and Director of the Center for Early Music Studies at Boston University. A musicologist and performer on lute and guitar, he works primarily in the areas of Renaissance music and popular culture, with a particular interest in interdisciplinary approaches, global perspectives, music and culture, African-American music, rock history, blues, improvisation, and performance issues. His books include Instrumentalists and Renaissance Culture,1420-1600 (with Keith Polk) (Cambridge), Music and Science in the Age of Galileo (Kluwer), Performance on Lute, Guitar, and Vihuela (Cambridge), The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar, and the recently published Cambridge Companion to the Rolling Stones (ed. with John Covach). http://people.bu.edu/blues/

In this workshop, we will be inspired by examples of types of journaling (Nature Journaling, Illustrated Daily Life Journaling, Travel Journaling, Garden Journals, Idea Journaling, Zentangles and Patterns, etc.) and how you might incorporate visual learning with your students. Most of the class will focus on actual watercolor painting, mixed media, drawing, lettering and composition techniques with some writing prompts for those interested in combining images and text in their journals. We will explore color mixing in watercolor and create abstract landscapes, and hone our observational skills making a pattern and color record of our individual surroundings. We will also learn the benefits of doodling and explore patterns and creating depth in your sketches in various ways. This workshop is meant to be a jumping off point for those who want to reignite their journaling practice and also for those who are new to artmaking. We’ll tie all of this into ways to incorporate the benefits or drawing and journaling with your students in all disciplines. If starting from scratch, participants should expect to spend between $25-$45 on supplies, including a watercolor paper journal.

Miranda Loud, Artist
Location: Online
Dates: January 28 & February 11, 2025; 9:30am-3pm with humane breaks from screen.

MIRANDA LOUD is a multimedia artist producing works in a variety of media: video, painting, collage, photography and music. She has held fellowships at the Banff Center for the Arts in Banff, Canada, the St. Botolph Club of Boston and, among a variety of awards, won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Gold Star Award for her multimedia performance Buccaneers of Buzz: Celebrating the Honeybee which was performed as part of the Cambridge Science Festival. Her work is available at www.mirandaloudartist.com.

Beyond Hollywood movies about childhood, which are often populated by adorable moppets or implausibly precocious kids, there are a host of films from around the globe that center on children who are more believable and less sentimentalized than their American screen counterparts. From post-WWII Italian neo-realism to the present, films that are about, but not for, young people have used the symbolic versatility of children to explore a wide array of issues. Such films address themselves to the experience of childhood while simultaneously exploring adult aspirations and anxieties. This seminar will range across cultures and national cinemas to track recurring narrative tropes and subtexts, as well as cultural discourses and ideologies, in these cinematic visions of childhood. Among the topics explored in the feature films, excerpts, and readings that we will discuss are the social construction of childhood; the child as tabula rasa; the child as watcher and witness; the presumption of childhood innocence and purity; the nature of family; the meaning of home; the effects of modernity, capitalism, and migration on children; and the responsibilities of nations and civic institutions to their most vulnerable citizens.

Julie Levinson, Babson College
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: May 1 & 8. 2025; 9:30am-3pm.

JULIE LEVINSON is Professor of Film at Babson College where she holds the William R. Dill endowed chair. She is the author of The American Success Myth on Film, editor of Alexander Payne: Interviews, and co-editor of Acting: Behind the Silver Screen. Her publications in journals and edited collections focus on a range of topics including genre and gender, documentary film, cultural representations of work, metafiction, and narrative theory. She has been a film curator for arts institutions including Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Boston Film/Video Foundation, the Flaherty Film Seminar and the Celebration of Black Cinema. She has served as an editorial consultant for documentary films, as a film festival programmer, and as a panelist for organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Julie is currently working on a book titled Cities of Lost Children: Street Kid Films and the Urban Imaginary in Global Cinema.

What was your chance of survival as a Roman gladiator? What were the stages of schooling for a Roman child? How often did a Roman bathe? How could you cast a spell in ancient Rome?

In this two-day seminar, we answer these and other questions about the everyday life of ordinary Romans: men and women, young and old, free and enslaved. We will discuss four key aspects of ancient Roman lives: (1) education and schooling; (2) magic and religion; (3) the Roman baths; and (4) gladiators and the arena. Through a close examination of literary, artistic, and archaeological evidence, we will reconstruct what it was like to be a part of the ancient Roman world.

James Uden, Boston University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: November 8 and 15, 2024; 9:30am-3pm.

JAMES UDEN is Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University. He researches and teaches about Latin literature, Roman warfare, and the history of medicine. He is the author of The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome (Oxford, 2015) and Spectres of Antiquity: Classical Literature and the Gothic (Oxford, 2020), and co-editor of Literature and Culture in the Roman Empire, 96-235: Cross-Cultural Interactions (Cambridge, 2020).

In the wake of the SCOTUS decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) that struck down Roe v. Wade (1973), we explore some of the Court’s most significant decisions on key women’s rights, specifically political, economic, and bodily autonomy and privacy rights. At issue in many of these cases is whether women constitute a special and separate class in need of unique treatment (in terms of opportunities and protections) or women comprise a group of citizens with rights equal to those of men, in terms of both opportunities and protections. Among the cases we’ll analyze and discuss are: Minor v. Happersett (1875) which held that the 14th Amendment did not guarantee women the right to vote; rather women constituted a special class of non-voting citizen; Muller v. Oregon (1908) which opined that the state could limit women’s working hours in order to protect women’s health in direct contrast to Lochner v. New York (1905) where the state was barred from restricting men’s working hours; and Buck v. Bell (1927) which affirmed a state’s right to forcibly sterilize a person considered unfit to procreate and enabled the sterilization of nearly 70,000 people, mostly women of color and poor women from the 1920s to the mid-1970s.

Maura A. Henry, Holyoke Community College
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: November 12 &  December 3, 2024; 9:30am-3pm.

MAURA HENRY is an historian who has taught in and co-led Harvard’s History and Women’s Studies programs. Having earned her bachelor’s degree at Smith in History and Philosophy and her master’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard, Maura explores gender, power, and culture in her scholarship and interdisciplinary courses. Her writings include A Duchess’s Grand Tour, The Making of Aristocratic English Culture, The Soul of the People and the WPA’s Writer’s Project, and Rescue (an award-winning screenplay). She has previously led a TAS study tour to Dublin. Currently, she is working on a manuscript on family, dysfunction, and meaning.

Is Boston the nation’s most racist city? With a reputation as the “Cradle of Liberty,” the city often prides itself for its progressive politics, but many residents of color argue its legacy is actually that of segregation and racial inequality. Why has Boston’s racial history been obscured and what was its role in the civil rights movement?  What did the civil rights movement look like outside the U.S. South and how does the city of Boston provide a useful case study for examining the movement in the urban north? In this two-day seminar, teachers will be introduced to Boston’s postwar racial history, including segregation, migration, and urban crisis in Boston’s “Black Boomerang” neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and the South End. We will examine how African American and Latinx residents organized the local civil rights movement, a series of interconnected grassroots mobilizations around issues like poverty, welfare, housing, and education from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Tatiana Cruz, Simmons University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: December 6 & December 13, 2024; 9:30am-3pm.

TATIANA CRUZ is a Boston native and an Assistant Professor and Director of Africana Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Simmons University. She is also the Founding Co-Director of the North Star Collective, a regional consortium of colleges and universities committed to faculty racial equity. Her research interests include African American and Latinx history, social movements, Race/Ethnic Studies, oral history, urban history, and Women’s and Gender Studies. Dr. Cruz is currently completing a book titled Deep North Uprising: African American and Latinx Politics and Protest in Boston (University of Pennsylvania Press) and has published in the Journal of Urban History, the New England Quarterly, and has a forthcoming chapter in an edited collection called Black Movement: African American Urban History Since the Great Migration (University of North Carolina Press). She received her B.A. from Williams College, and a M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

The Boston Athenaeum, one of the oldest independent libraries in the U.S., voraciously acquired books, art and artifacts and quickly rose to become Boston’s center of intellectual life in the 19th century. This 2-day course will explore Boston history through the lens of the Athenaeum’s collections, especially its rare materials and works of art and how these reflect (or don’t reflect) the stories of different populations, political struggles and debates in the city in the 19th century. Participants will learn from curators and scholars about the role of photography, printing and publishing in this time period, visit sites connected to Beacon Hill’s 19th century Black community and spend time throughout the Athenaeum’s beautiful building. Participants will each receive 5 day membership passes to use beyond the workshop.

Michelle LeBlanc, The Boston Athenaeum
Location: The Boston Athenaeum, Boston, MA
Dates: February 27 & March 11, 2025; 9:00am-3pm.

MICHELLE LEBLANC is the Director of Education at the Boston Athenaeum. She previously served as Director of Education for a decade at the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library. She has over 20 years of experience in museums, libraries and classrooms, teaching history and designing collaborative programming for varied audiences. She previously ran two federal Teaching American History grant programs for K-12 educators through The Education Cooperative, a collaborative of 16 school districts in the Boston area. Before that, she worked across a variety of historical sites, from Old South Meeting House and the Paul Revere House to Historic New England. She received her M.A. in History/ Public History from Northeastern University and is a licensed teacher for grades 5-8 in Massachusetts.

This two-day seminar examines how race has informed a particular narrative of American history. Due to the deliberate racialization of American citizenship, this historical narrative amplified certain voices, while muting others, particularly those of African descent. Hands-on analyses of primary artifacts (e.g. letters and newspapers), specifically drawn from archives located in Boston, will be used to identify and discuss concrete examples of historical privileging and repression—two devices employed in the “making” of a monolithic depiction of American history. The seminar concludes with the creation of a digital timeline of a specified period in American history that captures a more inclusive historical narrative.

Margarita Simon Guillory, Boston University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates:  February 25 & March 3, 2025; 9:30am-3pm.

MARGARITA SIMON GUILLORY is an Associate Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Boston University. She is the author of Social and Spiritual Transformation in African American Spiritual Churches (Routledge 2018) and co-editor of Esotericism in African American Religious Experience (Brill 2014). Her current project, Africana Religion in the Digital Age (under contract with Routledge), considers how African Americans utilize the Internet, social media, mobile applications, and gaming to forge new ways to express their religious identities.

In this two-day class we will examine the impact of urban renewal on New York City and Boston in the middle of the 20th century. In doing so, we will ask the question: Why did cities choose to massively reconfigure large sections, often dislocating citizens and erasing neighborhoods? The first class will look at the history of urban renewal, focusing on the career of “master builder” Robert Moses, who transformed the city with bridges, parks, roads, and housing. We will also look at the writings of Jane Jacobs, who played a major role in opposing urban renewal. The second class will look at how urban renewal changed the city of Boston, as we study the demolition of the West End and Scollay Square. The second day will include a walking tour of the old West End and a visit to the West End Museum. By examining urban renewal in depth, this workshop will touch on many of the broader themes of 20th century U.S. history, from the Progressive Era to the New Deal and Great Depression to the economic and social life of 1950s America down to the era of protests and advocacy in the 1960s.

Vincent Cannato, UMass Boston
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: April 1 & 8, 2025; 9:30am-3pm.

VINCENT J. CANNATO is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He received his BA with honors in Political Science from Williams College and his PhD in History from Columbia University. At UMASS Boston, Prof. Cannato teaches courses on New York City history, Boston history, immigration history, and twentieth-century American history. He is the author of American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (HarperCollins, 2009); The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and his Struggle to Save New York (Basic Books, 2001); and co-editor of Living in the Eighties (Oxford University Press, 2009). He is currently working on a political biography of Francis Cardinal Spellman, former archbishop of New York. Professor Cannato has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Politico, Humanities Magazine, and The New Republic.

This two-day seminar explores the lives of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) people in the United States. A quick glance at the news headlines shows us how LGBTQ issues have become central to political debates, often in ways that are quite polarizing, from debates over “don’t say gay” to fights over bathroom bills. This seminar backs up a few steps from the heated rhetoric to explore the history of LGBTQ people, including the emergence of queer and trans political movements, the importance of the AIDS crisis and the gay marriage movement, and the fight for visibility in politics and media. We will also explore the history and politics of religion and LGBTQ issues, including both religious opposition to queer and trans people but also various forms of progressive support for LGBTQ people that come from religious leaders and organizations. We will come away from our seminar with better tools to understand the longer history of LGBTQ people, how to talk about and engage with these issues today, and how to support members of our communities who identify as LGBTQ.

Anthony Petro, Boston University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: April 4 & 11, 2025; 9:30am-3pm.

ANTHONY PETRO is an associate professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and of Religion at Boston University. He is the author of After the Wrath of God: AIDS, Sexuality, and American Religion (Oxford University Press, 2015) as well as many essays dealing with the history and politics of religion, gender, and sexuality. His latest book project, Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars, looks at the history of feminist and queer artists who “got in trouble” with the Christian Right. Anthony holds a Ph.D. in Religion from Princeton University, an M.A. in the Social Sciences from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in religious studies from Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA.

For a work continually regarded as foundational in Western Civilization since the Fifth Century BC, in Athens, where Plato challenged Homer’s pre-eminence over every aspect of cultural life, The Odyssey presents a surprising number of interpretive challenges. Its authorship, its genre, and the moral status of its hero, are by no means settled matters. This class will concentrate on three topics: the character of Odysseus—his psychological, intellectual, and moral nature; the plot– which moves him, through many detours, back home to Ithaca from the Trojan war by boats, sometimes by rafts, once by swimming all alone, across most of what was considered by the Ancients as the known world; and finally, the main theme governing both character and plot in the poem—the virtue required for and achieved in the life-threatening project of re-establishing justice in a world gone wrong, and the role of Divine Power which enigmatically ordained that project, and, at crucial moments in the poem, secretly aids it.

Theo Theoharis, Harvard University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: October 28 & November 4, 2024; 9:30am-3pm.

THEO THEOHARIS teaches at Harvard University.  He is the author of James Joyce’s Ulysses: An Anatomy of the Soul and Ibsen’s Drama: Right Action and Tragic Joy.  His latest book is Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy.  He has lectured throughout Europe and the U.S. and has led many professional development activities for teachers.

This two-day seminar grows out of a long collaboration between an English professor and an English Education professor, who tackle questions of what it means to teach literature in general and American literature in particular in 2025, as interest in the humanities wanes as a site for teaching and learning, and as rising nationalism in the US confronts a range of social movements that push us toward equity. This seminar will explore what it means to make determinations about what sorts of objects of study qualify as literature, what makes them American (or not), what sorts of texts are worth exploring and teaching, how we might approach the task of teaching American literature with young people, and how to confront the challenges of representing diverse genres, historical periods, identities, and beliefs in an American literature course. This seminar will include units on curricular organization, representation, engagement, and assessment, with a focus on broader questions to consider when making practical classroom decisions. We will work at various scales (from social and historical contexts, to pedagogical theory and tactics, to textual explication). The course will include discussion (in different formats), in-class activities (individual and group), reading (in-class and outside). There should also be time to talk about college readiness and compare the teaching of English at the high school and college levels.

Christina Dobbs and Maurice Lee, Boston University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: January 31 & February 7, 2024; 9:30am-3pm.

CHRISTINA L. DOBBS is associate professor and program director in English Education for Equity and Justice at the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development at Boston University.  She studies critical disciplinary literacy, teacher learning and preparation and organizational change, and her most recent book is Disciplinary Inquiry and Instruction, 2^nd edition.  She collaborates with Professor Mo Lee to work with future teachers in English/language arts.

MAURICE S. LEE is Professor of English at Boston University, where he publishes and teaches nineteenth-century American literature. He has edited the Cambridge Companion to Frederick Douglass, and his most recent book is Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution. With Professor Christina Dobbs, he teaches courses training undergraduate and graduate students to be high school ELA teachers.

Where do we begin when setting out to tell stories? You can start with an idea, or a plot, of course; but for some of us, character is paramount: fiction illuminates human experience, why people make particular choices or form certain relationships. As writers, we reach for the universal through the specific: the more fully rounded our characters are, the more believable our fiction. E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, makes a distinction between ‘story’ and ‘plot’, where the former is a sequence of events (and then?) and the latter involves human motivation (and why?).

In this 2-day course, which is primarily a workshop, we’ll discuss elements of craft (point of view, voice, dialogue, detail) through the lens of character. We’ll look at one or two pieces of published short fiction & brief craft essays (to be read ahead of time); and will engage in writing exercises (both in class & a brief exercise to do at home between classes) to be workshopped.

Claire Messud, Harvard University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: February 27 & March 6, 2025; 9:30am-3pm.

CLAIRE MESSUD’S bestselling novels include The Emperor’s Children, a New York Times Book of the Year in 2006; The Woman Upstairs (2013); and The Burning Girl (2017), a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Fiction. She is also the author of a book of novellas, The Hunters (2001), and a memoir-in-essays, Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write (2020). Her work has been translated into over twenty languages. She writes for Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books and the New York Times, among other publications. She was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture in 2020. Her new novel, This Strange Eventful History, was just published by W.W. Norton in May 2024. Messud teaches creative writing at Harvard University. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her family.

In the past several decades, the form of comics has emerged as a culturally significant medium of narrative art. Today comics works have won Pulitzer Prizes, have been adapted for Broadway and Hollywood, occupy special issues of the New York Times Book Review, inspire dedicated imprints from major book publishers, and are reviewed everywhere, and with as much fervor, as novels. Out of what histories does contemporary comics spring, and what can the form accomplish? How do we describe its differences from other kinds of narratives?

This course aims to understand what the word and image form of comics allows: why do authors write graphic narratives as opposed to prose narratives? How does comics document subjectivity, for both fictional and nonfictional characters? How does the medium build storyworlds for characters to inhabit? 

Attending to the formal language—or grammar—of comics, the course will also offer opportunities to create comics (no drawing experience required!), to turn time into space in the way that is characteristic of the medium. In creating comics of our own, we will be studying how artists slow readers down in order to grasp details, style, dense or intricate composition, and the materiality of the book as object.

Jon Najarian, Colgate University
Location: Online
Dates: February 28 & March 7, 2025; 9:30am-3pm with humane breaks from screen.

JONATHAN NAJARIAN is Visiting Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Colgate University, where he teaches classes in comics, visual rhetoric and culture, and writing and technology. He is the editor of Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2024), and his essays and reviews have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, American Periodical Studies, and Contemporary Literature, among other venues.

In this seminar we look at some significant ways in which the English language has developed over the last thousand years. How did Old English “cniht” become Modern English “knight,” with both a different pronunciation and spelling, and with a modified meaning – and what about those silent letters? We’ll look at how English has “borrowed” thousands of words from other languages, especially Latin and Greek, and how they have enriched the language. As well as looking at individual words, we’ll read passages from Beowulf, Sir Gawain, Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and T. S. Eliot, observing how English has changed from being a virtually “foreign” language into the familiar vernacular we use today. Only an interest in language and willingness to explore some moderately technical details are needed to enroll in this seminar.

Graeme Bird, Gordon College
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: March 7 & 13, 2025; 9:30am-3pm.

GRAEME BIRD studied classics and mathematics in his native New Zealand, before coming to the US in 1981 to pursue his interest in jazz piano at the Berklee College of Music. He later got his PhD in classical philology at Harvard, and has been involved in education ever since. He currently teaches linguistics and classics at Gordon College, and mathematics, including Greek mathematics, at Harvard Extension and Summer School.

In his preface to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in America in 1885, Mark Twain announces that his book is written in vernacular English. Both a warning and a boast that his dialogue favored reality at the expense of propriety, Twain implies clearly that his book would be concerned with truth rather than convention, and would therefore be more important to its audience morally. Percival Everett’s 2024 revisionist novel James takes Twain at his explicit and implicit word. In order to favor reality, ironically discredit social convention, and write a morally important novel, Everett focuses his first -person narrative on Jim, changing his name to James, with everything that implies, chiefly– new dignity, adulthood and complex self-awareness. Highly literate, learned in the moral philosophy of the most important 18 and 19th century European and American thinkers, James, because he is a slave, and for most of the novel a runaway slave, has to disguise all this, at time’s literally in black face minstrelsy, and often in the verbal equivalent of barely literate, ungrammatical mumbling. He meets Huck on his flight to freedom, and the novel then replays many of the adventures from Twain’s book, with the important difference that now it is James’ first-person narration, not Huck’s, through which we experience the moral crime of white racism, and its effects on what W.E.B Dubois called “The Soul of Black Folks.”

Theo Theoharis, Harvard University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: April 3 & 10, 2025; 9:30am-3pm.

THEO THEOHARIS teaches at Harvard University.  He is the author of James Joyce’s Ulysses: An Anatomy of the Soul and Ibsen’s Drama: Right Action and Tragic Joy.  His latest book is Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy.  He has lectured throughout Europe and the U.S. and has led many professional development activities for teachers.

An introduction to the ideas of data science using spreadsheets. We will find and display data illustrating climate change, the pandemic, and topics of participants’ choice. In addition, we will build spreadsheet models of credit card debt or make projections. The seminar will not expect prior knowledge of spreadsheets. A computer which can access the internet and a google login are helpful; participants can work in google sheets or in Excel.

Deborah Hughes Hallett, University of Arizona and Harvard Kennedy School; Eric Connally, Harvard Extension
Dates: November 1 & 15, 2024; 9:30am-3pm.

DEBORAH HUGHES HALLETT is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. With Andrew M. Gleason at Harvard, she organized the Calculus Consortium based at Harvard and she is an author of several college level mathematics texts. Her work has been recognized by prizes from Harvard, the University of Arizona, the Association for Women in Mathematics, the Mathematical Association of America, and was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for contributions to mathematics education.

ERIC CONNALLY is principal software engineer at Illustrative Mathematics, a non-profit organization that develops K-12 curriculum materials. He has taught math at Harvard College, Harvard Kennedy School, and Wellesley College, and has co-authored several math textbooks. He currently teaches a course on spreadsheets at Harvard Extension School, where he has been an instructor for close to 30 years.

Voters across the political spectrum in the United States recognize serious issues in how we select the winners of our elections. For instance, the candidate who wins the Electoral College might differ from the candidate who wins the popular vote in a Presidential election. Additionally, primary elections can result in candidates who are unacceptable to the majority of voters. A fundamental problem is that different election methods can yield different winners even when voters’ preferences remain unchanged.

However, these issues aren’t limited to national elections—they can arise whenever a group makes a collective decision, whether it’s a committee selecting a scholarship winner or a group of friends deciding on a movie. We will use a bit of geometry and high school algebra to explore the rich structure underlying decision-making procedures. By understanding this structure, we can explain why different voting methods produce different outcomes and analyze some of the proposed reforms, such as Ranked Choice Voting.

Tommy Ratliff, Wheaton College
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: Oct. 29 & Nov. 12, 2024 ; 9:30am-3pm.

TOMMY RATLIFF is a Professor of Mathematics at Wheaton College, where he has taught for nearly 30 years. His teaching spans the entire curriculum, from introductory courses for first-year students to advanced topics like Cryptography. His research primarily focuses on Voting Theory, with recent work addressing mathematical questions related to redistricting and gerrymandering. He has been an active member of the Mathematical Association of America, particularly in the Northeastern Section, and he has also held several faculty leadership roles at Wheaton. However, all of his administrative experiences have reaffirmed his love of the classroom and helping undergraduates think deeply about interesting mathematics.

We are now more than twenty years beyond the publication of Michael Lewis’ classic book Moneyball, which popularized the previously niche subject of sports analytics.  Since that time the field has grown and evolved, and now the introduction of legalized wagering on sports has made a generation much more interested in data analytics.  In this course, we will look at some of the key analytics ideas that are now deeply ingrained in sports teams and leagues, we will explore new applications including using biomedical data to improve performance, and we will examine the growth of gambling.  We will provide examples that can be used at various classroom levels from elementary through high school.  We will even unwrap the mystery of how the MIAA power rankings work for team sports! (Note:  This course will only overlap about 30% with the TAS course I offered on sports analytics a decade ago, so that teachers who enrolled in that course will see plenty of new material.) 

Richard Cleary, Babson College
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: January 30 and February 6, 2025; 9:30am-3pm.

RICK CLEARY teaches at Babson College where he is Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and Weissman family Professor of Business Analytics. He has previously taught at Bentley University, Harvard University, Cornell University and St. Michael’s College.  He works as an applied statistician in various fields, with recent publications related to sports, fraud detection in accounting, measuring creativity in business students, and biomechanics.  Rick is the Vice-President of the Mathematical Association of America, and serves as first editor of a new journal, Scatterplot, that debuted in 2024 with a goal of helping mathematics teachers prepare students for careers in data science.  He has athletic experience as a runner (including 32 Boston marathons), a high school and college cross country coach, a race director and a youth sports coach in soccer, basketball and baseball.

Using just basic algebra, we introduce numerous games that can be played at all grades, from K up to 12, that serve as a springboard to encouraging students and teachers to think creatively. For example, for over 2000 years Fibonacci numbers have played roles in a variety of fields, from art to pure math to biology to NCAA basketball tournaments and beating the bank at roulette! We’ll discuss these and other applications, tailoring the games and activities to reflect the classes and interests of the participants, and describing the challenges of adjusting the material on the fly in the classroom. For instance, we can discuss how to win in tic-tac-toe in a way accessible to all, and introduce new variants (such as “investment” tic-tac-toe) for those who are comfortable with more advanced mathematics.

Optional Opportunity:

The instructor is the president-elect of the Fibonacci Association, and has done many of these topics in local schools, with kindergartners discovering the Fibonacci relations and posing great problems. The goal is to excite everyone, to a sense of discovery and ownership. Those interested can participate in writing math outreach articles and invitations (and hopefully funding support!) to speak at a future Fibonacci conference (tentatively Istanbul in 2026, somewhere in the US in 2028).

Steven J. Miller, Williams College
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: February 3 & 10, 2025; 9:30am-3pm.

STEVEN J. MILLER is a Professor of Mathematics at Williams College. He has written over 200 papers with over 600 students in accounting, computer science, economics, geology, marketing, number theory, probability / statistics, and sabermetrics, and 6 books on Benford’s law, cryptography, number theory, operations research and probability. He is active in high school mathematics, lecturing and mentoring at programs for talented students, participating in education conferences and writing problems for competitions, and serving as an elected member of the Lanesborough -Williamstown Regional School District. His math riddles webpage is often a top hit in Google searches, and he and his students have consulted on projects involving major league baseball, health care companies, financial firms, and school districts. He’s the President-Elect of the Fibonacci Association, and is active in outreach efforts to students and teachers.

In recent years, we have been inundated with news and opinions about the interactions between law enforcement and civilians. In this journey, we first discuss how these lived experiences are often translated into data. By further examining this data, we explore the distinction between correlative and causal thinking—crucial skills for a well-informed citizenry, especially when addressing complex and sensitive social issues such as police discrimination. By investigating the question of whether police officers discriminate, we debate what the data says, learn to question assumptions, and differentiate between reasonable and unreasonable conclusions. And through engaging with real-life data and some philosophies on how to think about the data, the goal is for participants to engage more thoughtfully with current events, public policies, and societal debates that our students find important. While it is useful, it is not required for participants to have taken a basic statistics course beforehand.

Eric Chan, Babson College
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: April 4 and 11, 2025; 9:30am-3pm.

ERIC W. CHAN is an Assistant Professor of Statistics and Public Policy at Babson College. Prior to his PhD, he worked for the Boston Public Schools helping educators and school leaders strategize on how to use data to support student learning and family engagement. Eventually, he combined his two loves (statistics and education policy) towards a teaching and research career where he examines how information for families affects student and housing outcomes. He developed a course at Babson, Quantitative Analysis of Structural Injustice, where undergraduate students uses real-life data to investigate complex problems in the social sciences.

The Earth is an active planet. Interior processes drive plate tectonics producing events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. In the atmosphere, we see events ranging from small thunderstorms up to large systems like nor’easters and hurricanes. In this course, we will examine the earth systems underlying these events to better understand how and why they occur. These events often cause damage. Through case studies of past natural disasters, we will explore the mechanisms through which they cause damage, and how we can prevent or reduce damage from these events. We will explore these topics with models, demonstrations, and activities that could be adapted to use in elementary, middle, and high school classes.

Chuck Winrich, Babson College
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: November 1 & 8. 2024; 9:30am-3pm.

CHUCK WINRICH teaches at Babson College where he is an Associate Teaching Professor of Physics. He has previously taught at Boston University, Union College, and worked at the Schenectady Museum. His scientific training is in Astronomy, but he teaches across a wide range of planetary and physical sciences. His most recent publications include a study of incorporating history as a method to improve physics teaching, and an introduction to semiconductor physics. In his spare time, he enjoys sailing on Lake Quinsigamond and cooking.

Today’s youth will be disproportionately impacted by climate change, relative to the older members of society. Students deserve to understand the severity of the climate change crisis and how it will impact their future livelihoods, as climate change touches all aspects of society in a variety of scope and contexts. Nevertheless, the severity and scale of this problem presents unique challenges to effectively teaching this material to young people.

This two-day online workshop will focus on understanding the fundamentals of climate change. We will focus on the causes and consequences of the rapid planetary warming on people and the environment. To do this we will use existing datasets to explore how climatic warming has altered rates of sea level rise, Arctic sea ice loss, permafrost thaw, and ocean acidification. We will examine projections in global temperatures depending on emission scenarios, with specific focus on ecological impacts of various scenarios. Finally, we will explore a range of solutions to the climate crisis – and in doing so, we will address how to approach the severity of the climate crisis in a way that motivates student interest and understanding without causing undo anxiety or disengagement.
Joanna Carey, Babson College
Location: Online
Dates: November 13 & 18, 2024; 9:30am-3pm with humane breaks from screen.

JOANNA C. CAREY is an Associate Professor of Earth & Environmental Science at Babson College. She teaches courses on oceanography, climate change, systems thinking, and river ecology to non-science majors. Her research examines how human activities alter fundamental ecological processes in rivers, tundra, forests, and wetlands. Dr. Carey holds a Ph.D. in Earth Science from Boston University, and M.S. in Environmental Science from Yale University, and B.S. in Environmental Policy from Virginia Tech.

The human brain is one of the most remarkable structures to evolve in the history of life on the earth. While the structural brain is necessary, is it sufficient to create a mind? In this seminar we will explore how the biology of the brain and the learned experiences from life and culture form the mind of an individual. The phrase “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” (the growth of an individual follows the evolutionary pattern of the species) will guide us as we explore the interplay between evolutionary neurobiology, the physics that constrain building a successful biological computing system and how the mind is an inevitable outcome of having brains. We will consider the neurology of development and the education of the brain (autism, genius, dyslexia, etc.). This year the course will be conducted as a series of hands-on experiments and our discussions will be informed by the class experiences and the understanding of these key experiences.
Peter Bergethon, Independent Scholar
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: January 10 & 17, 2025; 9:30am-3pm.

PETER BERGETHON returned last year to Teachers as Scholars after almost a decade of wandering in new lands of industrial science. Peter is a storyteller and explorer. He has made a living telling stories as a teacher and making discoveries in the natural world as a professional physician-scientist. As a biophysical chemist and neurologist, he cared for patients and wandered between the bedside and the lab bench asking: “How can I build a machine that I could tell stories to and it would laugh and cry?” He is equally at home in the field looking for the earth’s story as an amateur geologist or exploring the dynamics of the oceans as a SCUBA diver. An avid outdoorsman who tells a heart-stopping ghost story at the campfire, he has written or contributed to over 130 research papers and books including the SymmetryScience K-8 science education program – a science literacy program teaching and telling the story of science as “way of looking at the world”. He is the single author of The Physical Basis of Biochemistry: The Foundations of Molecular Biophysics, 2nd Ed., (New York:Springer-Verlag, 2010).

This two-part workshop is intended for teachers in grades K-5 who want to take their students outside for meaningful learning but either don’t know how to start or need new inspiration. Using the Arnold Arboretum’s landscape for learning, we will spend the first day outdoors using the framework “Observe, Talk, and Record” to experience outdoor tasks that meet a range of ages, developmental needs and life science-based curriculum goals. We will explore some common questions that come up during the season: What are some signs of spring? How do trees “know” when to push out leaves? Why are some trees shaped the way they are? How can we take the unpredictable in nature and turn it into a learning opportunity? Part Two will continue with outdoor experiences while also covering the challenges of managing children and materials in a school yard, nearby park or even at the Arboretum. Immerse yourself in the natural world to awaken your sense of wonder and curiosity, and gain more skills for your journey of teaching and learning outdoors.
Ana Maria Caballero, Outdoor Educator
Location: Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Boston, MA 02130
Dates: March 25 & April 9, 2025 (rain or shine!); 9:30am – 2:30pm , with a 30-min. lunch.

Ana Maria Caballero is the Outdoor Educator at the Arnold Arboretum. She has over 20 years of teaching experience with elementary aged students in public schools, and 10 years leading nature-based school programs at the Arboretum. Her passion is connecting children with the outdoors to make life-science learning engaging and alive! She has a BA in Early Childhood and Moderate Special Needs Education from Boston College.

This comprehensive workshop is tailored for high-school educators, primarily focusing on unraveling the intricacies of the technology behind state-of-the-art AI models such as ChatGPT. On day one, we will explore the foundational concepts of machine learning, transformers, multi-modal models, and fine-tuning. We will delve into the art of effective prompting strategies to optimize the utility of these AI tools. You will gain hands-on experience through demonstrations and activities, fostering a deeper understanding of using AI for your own teaching. As homework, you will use AI in a project of your own choosing. On day two, we will explore how AI can help students with their learning. We will explore the creative aspects of multimodal AI models. And we will also discuss the critical challenges associated with AI, including bias, misinformation, safety, and ethical considerations. This workshop is an invaluable opportunity for educators to deepen their knowledge and use of AI. It will enable you to confidently and competently navigate the quickly evolving AI landscape.

Hanspeter Pfister, Harvard University
Location: The Science and Engineering Complex (SEC), Harvard University
Date: November 14 & 21, 2024; 9:30am-3pm. SECOND SECTION ADDED: January 14 & 21, 2025

HANSPETER PFISTER is the An Wang Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and an affiliate faculty member of the Harvard Center for Brain Science. He served as director of the Institute for Applied Computational Science 2013-17 and as Academic Dean for Computational Science and Engineering 2021-24. His research in visual computing lies at the intersection of visualization, computer graphics, and computer vision. It spans various topics, including biomedical visualization, image and video analysis, machine learning, and data science. Pfister has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stony Brook University, New York, and an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Before joining Harvard, he worked for over a decade at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories as Associate Director and Senior Research Scientist. He was the chief architect of VolumePro, Mitsubishi Electric’s award-winning real-time volume rendering graphics card, for which he received the Mitsubishi Electric President’s Award in 2000. Pfister was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2019 and an IEEE Fellow in 2023. He received the 2010 IEEE Visualization Technical Achievement Award, the 2009 IEEE Meritorious Service Award, and the 2009 Petra T. Shattuck Excellence in Teaching Award. Pfister is a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Academy, the IEEE Visualization Academy, and a director of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee and the ACM SIGGRAPH Executive Committee. 

*** In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the publication of Michael Patrick MacDonald’s best-selling memoir All Souls, TAS is honored to offer this new seminar. ***

The Rest of the Story is a trauma-informed, restorative justice-rooted storytelling curriculum developed by Michael Patrick MacDonald, author of All Souls: A Family Story from Southie. In this two-day seminar, participants will use The Rest of the Story to learn the processes and skills for holding space in our classrooms for transformative empathic conversations on topics such as race and class dynamic as well as trauma and healing—ones that are sure to build one’s classroom-as-community. (Find more information about The Rest of the Story curriculum here.)

MacDonald will discuss his own process of transforming trauma by reclaiming his story and using it in the world as an organizer, writer, and teacher. From there participants will use the structure (circle process) and prompts from TRS to personally understand how it works. Participants will also write. All sharing is voluntary– always an invitation, never a demand; always opportunity, never demand. 

Readings: 

* All Souls: A Family Story from Southie 

* Excerpts from Trauma and Recovery by Dr Judith Hermann

* The Little Book of Circle Process 

* additional articles and short films TBD 

Michael Patrick MacDonald, author, professor, grassroots educator
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: November 19 & December 3, 2024; 9:30am-3pm.

MICHAEL PATRICK MACDONALD is the author of the New York Times Bestseller, All Souls: A Family Story from Southie and the acclaimed Easter Rising: A Memoir of Roots and Rebellion. He has won the American Book Award, a New England Literary Lights Award, and an award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. 

After losing four siblings and seeing his generation decimated by poverty, crime, addiction, and incarceration. MacDonald became a leading Boston organizer, launching anti violence initiatives including gun-buyback programs and support networks for survivors. He continues to work in Boston, Belfast, and North Inner City Dublin with survivor families, educators, and youth workers, using his restorative justice coalition-building curriculum, The Rest of the Story. He is Professor of the Practice in Northeastern University’s Honors Program and writes and speaks on topics ranging from Race and Class in America to Transforming Trauma to Voice, Agency, and Leadership. He is currently writing his third book of narrative nonfiction.