Seminars 2026-27

Walking is something that millions of us do each day; especially in cities, where the vast majority of people in the U.S. and around the world live. Seeing our surroundings on foot can be a means of seeing and understanding the history and ecology of the places that we call home. But what if walking, or rather, ways of walking, could also be a form of storytelling? This one-day seminar will dig into the weeds of that question with a scenic, 5-mile urban hike to two neighboring high points in the City of Boston—Mission Hill of Mission Hill, and Fort Hill of Roxbury. Participants will experience hidden parks, green spaces, and natural oddities nestled amidst an eclectic range of architecture styles and historic landmarks, many of which offer windows into the parallel and divergent stories of these twin peak-like hills. Along the way, we will reflect on the possibilities of using curated walking routes through local environments as a teaching tool and a medium of creative expression that teachers and students can explore. Teachers of all subjects and grade levels are encouraged to enroll. Please note that the hike will involve some climbing and descending in places, on sloped sidewalks and paved stairs.

Miles Howard, journalist, community organizer, and founder of Boston’s Walking City Trails.
Location: Meet and end at Roxbury Crossing Orange Line Station. Distance: 4.3 miles.
Date: November 3, 2026 (Rain date: November 5. We resort to rain date only for terrible weather. Drizzle ok.)

MILES HOWARD is an author, journalist, and community organizer based in Boston. His writing, which explores ways of making the outdoors more accessible to more people, has been published by The Boston Globe, Mountain Gazette, Yankee Magazine, and The New Republic. He has also written multiple Moon guidebooks on hiking and road tripping in New England. In 2022, he founded the Walking City Trails, an initiative to create park-to-park urban hiking trails connecting Boston parks and communities. Today, the network features over 140 miles of city trails.

Since it was first published in 1843, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol has never been out of print, has been translated into more than three dozen languages, and has been adapted into hundreds of radio, stage, and film productions over the past 183 years. For millions of people around the world, (re)reading or (re)watching A Christmas Carol is an annual tradition. Our course applies an interdisciplinary approach to deepen and enrich our understanding of Dickens’s classic tale about nineteenth-century British society, notably questions of power, wealth, inequality, and ethics. We analyze A Christmas Carol by closely reading the novella, placing it within its historical context among pertinent primary sources, and analyzing a selection of the modern film adaptations that reimagine and reconstruct Dickens’s story.

Maura A. Henry, Holyoke Community College
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: November 16 & December 7, 2026; 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.

The amount and complexity of information produced in science, engineering, business, and everyday human activity is increasing at staggering rates. This seminar combines foundational principles of perception, design, and storytelling with hands-on use of current AI tools. You will learn how the visual system processes images, what makes a chart honest or misleading, how color shapes understanding, and how to build a strong data story. Working in small teams, you will carry a raw dataset from initial question to finished visual data story, doing the design thinking yourself and using AI to implement it. No programming or prior software experience is required.

Hanspeter Pfister, Harvard University
Location: School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University
Dates: January 14 & 21, 2027; 9am–3pm.

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.

Charlotte Bronte’s fictional heroine Jane Eyre famously declared: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.” To what extent, though, was this more a fantasy rather than a lived reality for women in the middling ranks in 19th-century England? We explore gender and power through an interdisciplinary approach to the novel, pertinent historical sources, and a few modern film adaptations.

Maura A. Henry, Holyoke Community College
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: February 2 & 9, 2027; 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.

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 22, 30 & November 6, 2026; 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. Her most recent solo exhibition was (“Scrip(t) Scraps) at Kingston Gallery, Boston. 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:

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD — October 27, 2026
Harper Lee’s enduring classic To Kill a Mockingbird is adapted anew as Aaron Sorkin, the brilliant and beautifully idealistic creator of The West Wing and A Few Good Men, returns to writing for the stage. When upstanding lawyer Atticus Finch seeks justice for a wrongfully accused man, he is tested by the limits of his virtue and the uneasy work of forgiveness in a world ruptured in two. Harper Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has resonated powerfully for over six decades. What does it mean to revisit this beloved classic today with fresh eyes — to consider how far we’ve come, and how far we still need to go? Artistic Director Loretta Greco creates the first regional production of Sorkin’s soaring adaptation, especially for Boston.

ADIA & CLORA SNATCH JOY — December 4, 2026 (WORLD PREMIERE)
Our celebrated Ufot Family Cycle concludes its epic, citywide, two-and-a-half-year, nine-play journey where it began — here at The Huntington — with Mfoniso Udofia’s rousing folk opera Adia & Clora Snatch Joy. In the marshes of South Carolina, Clora Abernathy opens her front door to a stranger from Massachusetts — Adiaha Ufot — and something unnamed stirs within them. Both are dutiful daughters who’ve devoted their lives to their parents – but as the sparks fly, a life-changing question takes shape: What might happen if they dare to be good to themselves? To wholly experience desire, pleasure, and joy as grown-ass women — for the very first time. Soaringly composed for a cappella voices by Michael Ellis Ingram, Adia & Clora Snatch Joy breaks new ground while bringing the Ufot Family Cycle to a joyous, musical finale. Awoye Timpo, who brilliantly directed The Grove, returns to helm this landmark production that you can enjoy whether it’s the first play you are seeing in the Ufot Family Cycle or your ninth.

HAMLET — March 5, 2027
In this superb, funny, and deeply moving adaptation, Peruvian director Chela De Ferrari intertwines Shakespeare’s Hamlet with the lived experiences of a vibrant ensemble of eight actors with Down syndrome from Teatro La Plaza. With wry humor, playful energy, pop music, and pointed critique, the company confronts the play’s timeless themes with striking honesty and fresh insight. Drawing resonant parallels between Shakespeare’s world and our own, they offer a vision of a more just and joyful imagined future. Now an international sensation, the production premiered in Peru before a celebrated run at the Edinburgh International Festival and has since toured 20 countries and 51 cities, with subtitles in 11 languages. Performed in Spanish with projected English translation.

Marisa Jones, Huntington Theatre Co.
Location: The Huntington Theatre, Boston.
Dates: October 27, 2026; December 4, 2026; March 5, 2027.
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 Workforce Development.

In this seminar you will explore drawing in an experimental and process-oriented way. Even if you don’t draw, this course will teach you that everyone can draw and that drawing is an innate language for all humans. Drawing can be a way to relax, to see, to experiment, to build community, to connect more deeply to your senses and to explore problem-solving and creativity. You will keep a sketchbook and also be given lesson plans and ideas on how to integrate drawing into all subject areas as well as ways to use drawing for building classroom community. We will explore individual mark-making with a variety of drawing tools. We will draw to the senses: drawing to music and sounds, touch, taste, seeing and smell. We will learn a variety of drawing and visual thinking techniques that can be translated into simple yet powerful exercises in all classrooms, not only the art room. Learning to draw in science, math, language arts and history will be explained and several samples that teachers are using will be discussed. Teachers of all subjects and grade levels are welcomed and encouraged to enroll.

Deborah Putnoi, local artist, author, researcher, educator
Location: Deb Putnoi’s studio in Brighton, MA.
Dates: October 28 & November 4, 2026; 9:00am–3:00pm.

DEBORAH PUTNOI is a visual artist, educator and researcher. Putnoi has an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a 5th Year Graduate Degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and a B.A./B.F.A. from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (joint degree program). She has shown her work in solo and group exhibitions nationally to critical acclaim and her work is included in many significant collections. She has taught in a range of settings including elementary and secondary schools, universities, and community outreach organizations. Putnoi also worked for many years as a researcher with Howard Gardner at Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education working on research projects focusing on community art centers, museums and school learning. Putnoi is the author of The Drawing Mind. She also installs her Drawing Lab installations at schools, museums, non profits, science laboratories, temples, libraries and other spaces.

In this class, we will use design principles, intuition, choices about scale, texture, and detail for emphasis and storytelling. Collage is an accessible art form and a sophisticated design practice; personal and pre-eminently modern, it grabs materials from the maelstrom 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. We’ll discuss the 19th and 20th century origins of collage and in addition, explore creating a mixed media/collage “shrine,” using boxes and cartons, to create meaningful miniature spaces and house small objects. Adaptable to many curriculum topics, an imagined shrine celebrates the sacred things, experiences, memories, people and animals in our lives – or people and topics in history, science, literature and mathematics – deserving to be enshrined, celebrated, made special or even sacred. Art experience is a plus but not required!

Laurie Sheffield, Artist
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: November 10 & 19, 2026; 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.

Claire Tratnyek, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Location: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
Dates: December 11 & 14, 2026; 9:00am–3pm.

CLAIRE TRATNYEK is a museum educator, education researcher, and social historian interested in providing teachers and students with opportunities for robust dialogic engagement with visual culture and local histories. As the Director of School and Teaching Programs at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Claire draws on her background as a classroom teacher in Boston Public Schools to connect students and teachers with the museum’s collections. Claire holds a BA in History and Anthropology from Franklin Pierce College, a MA in History and a MA in Teaching from Northeastern University, and is currently a PhD candidate in History at Northeastern University.

Never let a crisis go to waste, said Rahm Emmanuel, and while AI has significantly disrupted many aspects of teaching, it has also reminded us of the importance of designing curriculum that fosters authentic engagement. In this hands-on, two-day workshop, we will explore how to engage students through fun, challenging and meaningful writing assignments. Teachers will have the opportunity to participate in writing projects that cultivate intrinsic motivation, create community, and offer opportunities for sustained open-ended exploration. AI has forced many of us to play defense. But if we want our students to be life-long learners, we must also offer them opportunities to experience the joy of writing. This course may be particularly relevant to teachers of grades 7-12, but all are welcome.

Ben Berman, author and teacher, Brookline High School
Location: Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square.
Dates: October 29 and November 5, 2026; 9:30am–3:00pm (Dates subject to change before September)

BEN BERMAN is the author of three books of poems and the collection of essays, Writing While Parenting, a 2023 Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year. He has won the Peace Corps Award for the Best Book of Poetry, has twice been shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Awards and has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, New England Poetry Club and Somerville Arts Council. He has been teaching for almost thirty years and has led Professional Development on the teaching of writing for Mass Poetry, GrubStreet, Primary Source, NCTE and The University of the Middle East Project. He currently teaches at Brookline High School. www.ben-berman.com

This seminar invites participants to engage seriously with comics and graphic novels as a distinct and powerful form of narrative art. Over two sessions, participants will read and discuss full-length works alongside key selections from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, developing a critical vocabulary for what the comics form makes uniquely possible and what it demands of its readers.

At the center of the course is the hand-drawn image: its expressive range, its relationship to language, and the aesthetic possibilities that open up when drawing becomes an act of storytelling. We’ll examine how cartoonists use line, sequence, page design, and the tension between image and text to achieve effects that neither prose nor film can quite replicate. Participants will come away with a richer critical framework for reading comics closely and attentively, practical assignments to use with students in their own classrooms, and a deeper appreciation for what makes the medium, at its best, irreducible to any other form.

Jon Najarian, Sacred Heart University
Location: Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: November 2 & 9, 2026; 9:30am–3:00pm

Jon Najarian is Assistant Teaching Professor of English at Sacred Heart University, where he teaches courses ranging from first-year writing to advanced seminars on comics and graphic narratives. His research sits at the intersection of visual culture, media studies, and print history. He is the editor of Comics and Modernism: History, Form, and Culture (2024) and has published widely on comics history and visual culture. He also serves on the editorial board of Studies in Comics.

What scares, shocks, and repulses us says a lot about who we are as individuals and as a society. So, what scared, shocked, and repulsed the ancient Greeks and Romans? This seminar examines Greek and Roman horror stories through four different themes: bodies, gender, disease, and spectacle. Each theme will introduce a different set of ancient stories, revealing the perennial nature of human fears even as we probe the unique historical and social contexts that gave rise to these stories. Monstrous and atypical bodies (cyclopes, werewolves, dwarves) show us how people in antiquity thought about far-away and otherwise unknown places, while witches and child-hunting ghosts represent fears closer to home. Plague narratives offer timeless responses to social and political change, while real-life horror in the gladiator’s arena reveals the unsettling ubiquity of violence in the ancient world. By studying these stories, seminar participants will walk away with a richer understanding of antiquity’s “others” – women, foreigners, slaves – and the ways in which those in power capitalized on fear and disgust to maintain social order.

Rebecca Moorman, Boston University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: November 6 & 13, 2026; 9:30am–3pm.

REBECCA MOORMAN is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University, where she teaches courses on Greek and Latin language as well as Roman literature, culture, and philosophy. Her research focuses on Latin poetry and Roman philosophy, especially the aesthetics of emotion and multisensory experience in the ancient world. Her first book, The Allure of Disgust in Ancient Rome: Knowledge, Poetics, and the Senses, explores the role of disgust in Latin philosophical literature. With Lorenza Bennardo at the University of Toronto, she also runs “Overlooked,” an international scholarly network studying poverty and marginality in the ancient world.

Even the best literature can feel distant, ossified, and irrelevant to students if they feel their role is merely to hunt down symbols and themes. An antidote for this feeling is rich, active exploration of a writer’s “craft,” the series of careful choices each writer makes that allow straightforward, denotative language to explode into resonance, nuance, mystery, and urgency. But how do we help students perceive and appreciate craft choices? One of the best ways is to hand them the pen. This two-day seminar offers instructors ways to bring creative writing into the classroom in order to animate literature as an active, ongoing creative process, one that involves collaboration between writer and reader.

Day 1 is especially writing-intensive. Participants will engage in specific exercises designed to illuminate the expressive value behind various abstract literary concepts, such as POV/perspective, line breaks, ambiguity, sentence patterning, repetition & variation, reversals, and more. Day 2 will focus on pairing brief creative pieces with longer works as in-class “hooks” to help students approach the central (sometimes overwhelming) moral, social, and existential questions of sample texts. Day 2 will also offer a workshop on how instructors might use creative writing to develop their own original hands-on exercises for texts used in their particular classrooms. This course may be particularly relevant to teachers of grades 7-12, but all are welcome.

We’ll do a lot of writing, and we’ll experiment with creative options to help students write their own way into an appreciation of diverse literature of all genres.

Allison Adair, Brookline Poet Laureate, Boston College and Grub Street
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: January 27 & February 5, 2027; 9:30am–3:00pm

ALLISON ADAIR is a poet and essayist living in Boston, where she teaches at Boston College and Grub Street and serves as the current Brookline Poet Laureate. Her debut collection, The Clearing, was selected by Henri Cole for Milkweed’s Max Ritvo Poetry Prize and named a New York Times “New and Noteworthy” book. Allison’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, Waxwing, and Georgia Review; and has been honored with the Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors’ Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in the Mid-American Review Fineline Competition. She has enjoyed collaborations with visual artists, musicians, historians, and writers working across the digital humanities. Originally from central Pennsylvania, Allison holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and degrees in English and History from Brown University. Learn more about her work at www.allisonadair.com.

Our reading of canonical literature is guided by generations of scholarship, but our reading of contemporary literature is guided by reviews and prizes. This seminar will explore how reviews and prizes work by taking the Booker Prize as a case study. We’ll read whatever novel wins the Booker Prize for 2026 (to be announced on November 9th), as well as a representative sampling of reviews. In class, we’ll learn about the literary prize system; we’ll also discuss the genre of the book review and experiment with writing our own.

Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: February 2 & 23, 2027

Amanda Claybaugh is a scholar of the novel, from the 19th to the 21st century. She is a professor in the English department at Harvard University, where she also serves as Dean of Undergraduate Education.

The phrase “lose the name of action” appears in Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, Act III, scene 1. In that scene Hamlet observes that people often fear moral retribution after death for acts committed during their life. He concludes that this fear makes people abandon dangerous but righteous actions, makes them doubtful and suspicious about those actions, instead of heroically devoted to them. The moral issues of the play are all included in the phrase “Lose the name of action.” Why do some people have a conscience, and others do not; how should morally alert people deal with those who are immoral, especially when the conflict occurs inside families; what do the living owe the dead; can thought resolve a crisis brought about by desire? In short, is action—the purposeful accomplishment of imagined, or thought-out, or prayed for aims—a real part of life? Might belief in action just be a flattering lie by which people convince themselves they are morally self-governing, self-conscious agents instead of what they really are: unreasoning, unresponsible, impulse-driven beasts. In this class we’ll do close reading of a few soliloquies and scenes to see how Shakespeare answers or doesn’t answer these questions.

Theo Theoharis, Harvard University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: March 3 & 12, 2027; 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.

Pioneering civil rights historian Charles Payne once observed that “men led, but women organized.” What happens when we teach civil rights history through the lens of the women who organized? This two-day seminar reexamines the long Black freedom movement, from civil rights through Black Power, through the women whose organizing, intellectual leadership, and community activism sustained and transformed the struggle for racial justice. Moving beyond traditional “Great Man” narratives, the seminar centers Black women who confronted not only white supremacy, but also the sexism and gender discrimination of “Jane Crow,” including within progressive movement spaces. We will examine the lives and activism of figures such as Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, Johnnie Tillmon, Angela Davis, and Elaine Brown, alongside rank-and-file women members in leading organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party. Together, we will explore how Black women were not only the backbone of the movement but also advanced their own feminist agendas through an active print culture, welfare rights activism, reproductive justice campaigns, and community survival programs, reshaping both the grassroots foundations and radical visions of the broader struggle for Black freedom.

Tatiana Cruz, Simmons University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: October 23 & 30, 2026; 9:30am–3pm.

DR. TATIANA CRUZ (she/her) is an Associate Professor and Department Chair of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Simmons University, where she holds the Hazel Dick Leonard Endowed Chair. She is the author of Deep North Uprising: African American and Latinx Politics and Protest in Boston (forthcoming) and has published widely in the fields of African American and Latinx history, Race/Ethnic Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Urban Studies. She holds a B.A. from Williams College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

This class will examine the origins and development of Christianity (or, more accurately, Christianities) as they develop in the ancient Mediterranean, North and East Africa, West Asia, and southern Europe. The class begins by considering what historians can know about small groups of Jesus followers in Roman Palestine, then looks at how the movement expands via trade routes and immigrant communities across the Roman Empire. While reading ancient primary sources (in translation), we will discuss a range of issues including religious practices, legal prosecution and martyrdom, doctrinal conflicts, the rise of asceticism, and the role of Constantine in generating religious orthodoxy. The course concludes by looking at long-lasting impact of the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.

Jennifer Eyl, Tufts University
Location: Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square.
Dates: December 8 & 15; 9:30am–3pm.

JENNIFER EYL received her PhD in Early Christianity from Brown University in 2012. Her research focuses on the origins of Christianity in the Roman Empire. She has published articles in the Journal of Ancient Judaism, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion and the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, as well as chapters in numerous books. She is the author of Signs, Wonders, and Gifts: Divination in the Letters of Paul (Oxford University Press, 2019) and the co-editor of Christian Tourist Attractions, Mythmaking, and Identity Formation (Bloomsbury, 2018). Dr. Eyl is a founding editor for Religions in the Ancient Mediterranean Book Series (Eisenbrauns) and serves on the Editorial Board for the Library of New Testament Studies Series (T&T Clark). She teaches classes about the origins and spread of Christianity across the ancient Mediterranean, North Africa, Near East, and Central Asia; gender and sexuality in early Christianity; ancient Greek religion; and ancient creationism and apocalypticism.

How can we use the theories, concepts, and methodologies of psychological science to better understand the diverse experiences of Asian Americans today? Through this course, participants will be introduced to psychological research and theory exploring a range of topics relevant to Asian Americans today, including identity, family processes, experiences of stereotypes and racism, and aspects of health and well-being. We will complement empirical psychological research with Asian American voices from other disciplines, including fiction, autobiographical essays, and popular media.

Stephen Chen, Wellesley College
Location: Cambridge Center for Adult Education
Dates: December 11 & 16, 2026

Stephen Chen (BA, Rutgers; PhD, UC Berkeley) is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Wellesley College, where he directs the Culture and Family Development Lab and teaches courses on topics of culture, emotion, and human development. His research with Asian American families examines how cultural and family processes interact to shape mental health and development across the lifespan. Currently, he is examining how Chinese American families integrate religious, spiritual, and philosophical beliefs with their experiences as racial-ethnic minorities to navigate questions of race and social mobility. Much of his research was inspired by his work at a K-12 international school in Asia, where he worked for a number of years before beginning his PhD in clinical psychology.

This class takes up a variety of nightlife spaces and contexts in which queer and trans people perform their pleasures and politics. Queer nightlife has been the center of political actions. We have witnessed state sanctioned raids on Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco in 1966, Stonewall in NYC in 1969, the White Party in Bombay in 1999, the Queen Boat in Cairo in 2001, amongst many others. From these key moments have erupted important moments of activism that shifted common understandings of queer and trans life; nightlife has been a politically salient ground for shaping queer and trans cultures. In this class, we explore how and why queer nightlife becomes so threatening to the state, and the ways that nightlife offers a place of refuge from the mundane violence of everyday life, a place of joy and pleasure. The class will also include an optional group attendance to a drag show and nightclub.

Kareem Khubchandani, Tufts University
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: January 28 & February 4, 2027; 9:30am–3pm.
Optional on January 29: Night out in Boston (Jacques Cabaret 10pm $20 cover + Legacy Nightclub midnight $20 cover)

KAREEM KHUBCHANDANI is the author of the award-winning and highly acclaimed books Decolonize Drag, Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife, and Lessons in Drag: A Queer Manual for Academics, Artists, and Aunties. He is also co-editor of the Lambda Literary-nominated Queer Nightlife, guest editor of Text and Performance Quarterly’s “Critical Aunty Studies,” and associate editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Kareem is Associate Professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University.

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, engage with collections about Beacon Hill’s Black activist community and spend time throughout the Athenaeum’s beautiful building. Participants will each receive a membership day pass to use beyond the workshop.

Michelle LeBlanc, The Boston Athenaeum
Location: The Boston Athenaeum, Boston, MA
Dates: February 24 & March 11, 2027; 9:30am–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.

The decade of the 1970s was a difficult and contentious period in American history, known for the energy crisis, stagflation, Watergate, and the loss of the Vietnam War. It is also known as the second Golden Age of Hollywood movies, with the decline of the old studio system and the rise of independent directors known for making films defined by a gritty realism and controversial subject matter. This course will look at the history of America in the 1970s through the lens of some classic films of the period, while also learning about how Hollywood changed during this decade. There will be some short, assigned readings that will provide background for the material. A number of films will be assigned for teachers to watch before class, so that we can discuss both the readings and films during class time.

Vincent Cannato, UMass Boston
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: March 30 & April 8, 2027; 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.

Sadly, students often learn math as a set of rules to apply to unmotivated exercises. We’ll discuss a variety of problems with minimal pre-requisites that highlight how and why to do algebra, drawing our examples from cryptography and game theory, as well as pure math. We’ll show how to use this material for classes from kindergarten to calculus. Topics may include: chocolate bar game (highlighting evens and odds), rectangle game (a special sequence of numbers), how to create a good statistic (figuring out what to study), the pirate game (going from easy states to more complicated), and RSA encryption (abstract algebra, number theory and modern e-commerce!). One of the goals of the seminar is to help teachers create modules and exercises for their classes.

Pre-requisites: a willingness to actively explore math; basic algebra is enough for most (if not all!) of the topics.

Steven Miller, Williams College
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: October 19 & 26, 2026; 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 of the Fibonacci Association, and is active in outreach efforts to students and teachers.

Some mathematics teachers, across levels from K-12 to PhD programs, are operating with an “eyes closed” strategy on the changes wrought by Artificial Intelligence and other technologies. As Editor of Scatterplot, the Data Science Journal of the Mathematical Association of America, I believe that this is not a winning or sustainable approach. In this course we will use examples from the K-12 curriculum to consider approaches to course design and assessment that might allow students to engage with AI without losing the skills they will need for success in standardized tests (such as MCAS and SAT) and college mathematics courses.

Richard Cleary, Babson College
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: December 2 & 9, 2026; 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 has served two terms on the Board of Directors 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.

Course description coming.

Johannah Nikula, Mathematics Education Consultant
Location: The Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Date: TBA; 9:30am–3pm.

Bio coming.

Weather and climate are, as they say, everyday, and increasingly an important part of the K-12 curriculum. There is an enormous amount of information available on these topics and how they work. The interplay between weather and climate can be confusing and even seem contradictory. In this two-day class Dave Epstein, meteorologist for WGBH and the Boston Globe, will illustrate the critical data needed for accurate forecasting, present general weather concepts, and provide accessible information for use in participants’ classrooms on climate and weather.

David Epstein, meteorologist for WGBH and the Boston Globe
Location: Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: November 12 & 18, 2026; 9:30am–3pm

DAVID EPSTEIN has been a meteorologist and horticulturist for over 30 years. Dave writes for the Boston Globe and can be heard daily on WGBH. Dave has three podcasts: Weather Wisdom takes a look at the weather each day; Ocean Currents looks at happenings in the Gulf of Maine and beyond; and Growing Wisdom gives tips on gardening and other aspects of the natural world. Dave has a large following on Twitter @growingwisdom and a successful YouTube channel with hundreds of how-to videos and 65 thousand subscribers.

This two-day course invites educators to explore the dynamic intersection of art and science through hands-on workshops and guided gallery tours. Designed for teachers across disciplines, the program empowers you to help students think creatively and critically by blending scientific inquiry with artistic expression.

Our session will include activities that model innovative, interdisciplinary teaching strategies and create connections between all the letters of STEAM to spark curiosity and deepen understanding. By exploring concepts like how origami is used in aerospace engineering and visualizing data through textile art, you’ll gain tools to break down traditional subject boundaries and foster cross-disciplinary thinking in your classroom. This course is especially relevant for middle and high school teachers, but all are welcome. Join us and discover new ways to inspire your students at the intersection of imagination and discovery.

Dora Bever, Manager for Science Education, MIT Museum
Location: MIT Museum, Cambridge
Dates: November 17 & December 3, 2026; 9:00am–3:00pm

DORA BEVER is the Manager for Science Education at the MIT Museum, where she has spent the past six years designing and leading engaging, hands-on learning experiences for visitors and students. She brings over a decade of teaching experience in both classroom and informal settings, with a strong focus on equity and access in education. Dora holds a Master’s in Teaching and has a background in curriculum design, which she uses to create programs that aim to inspire curiosity in all learners.

Astronomy is changing fast. In the last decade, astronomers have discovered thousands of planets around other stars, imaged the shadow of a black hole, mapped the oldest light in the universe with extraordinary precision, and begun to probe the atmospheres of distant worlds. This two-day seminar will explore some of the most exciting recent discoveries in astrophysics, asking what these results reveal about our place in the universe — and what remains unanswered. Topics will include exoplanets and the fate of planetary systems, stellar explosions, black holes, dark matter and dark energy, and the next generation of telescopes changing how we see the cosmos.

In an era when anyone can receive instant explanations from large language models, one of the most important intellectual skills is resisting cognitive offloading. This seminar will use frontier astronomy to practice a different habit of mind: slowing down, weighing evidence and uncertainty, and asking what question comes next. Participants will discuss how teachers can help students move from “What is the answer?” to “How would we know?” No prior background in astronomy is required.

JJ Hermes, Boston University
Location: Cambridge Center for Adult Education, Harvard Square
Dates: December 1 & 8, 2026; 9:30am–3:00pm

JJ HERMES is an Associate Professor of Astronomy at Boston University, where he leads a research group studying white dwarf stars and the end stages of stellar and planetary systems. His research often uses high-precision observations from NASA facilities, including the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). He has recently taught large introductory astronomy lecture courses on “The Astronomical Universe” and “Alien Worlds,” and regularly leads field trips to BU telescope facilities near Flagstaff, Arizona.

Join us for an immersive, 1-day professional development workshop designed to equip K-12 teachers with an overview of coastal climate change effects, adaptive strategies, and nature-based research happening in Boston Harbor.

This course will provide a look at some of the threats facing Boston’s coastline and innovative solutions being developed to adapt to them. We’ll start with an introduction to local climate change research and initiatives. Then teachers will become students in a coastal community simulation game, debating about and designing adaptation strategies for a fictional coastal town. In the afternoon we’ll head outside to experience place-based learning first hand by engaging in scientific protocols at a nearby cove, turning our local environment into a living laboratory.

This workshop is more than just a lecture: it’s a practical guide to empowering your students to become active participants in understanding and addressing climate change in their own communities.

Rebecca Shoer and Liana Greenberg-Nielsen, Stone Living Lab
Location: UMass Boston Campus
Date: April 2, 2027; 9:00am–3pm

REBECCA SHOER is the Senior Program Manager for Education and Engagement. Her role at the Stone Living Lab is to develop and facilitate learning experiences for Boston Harbor communities, including authentic science initiatives, professional development opportunities, and family learning events. Prior to her work at the Stone Living Lab, she coordinated a number of science programs including the Save Our Streams program at the Izaak Walton League of America and two turtle conservation programs at Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary. Rebecca received her B.A. from Williams College.

LIANA GREENBERG-NIELSEN is the Education and Engagement Program Coordinator for the Lab. She is responsible for developing and facilitating education experiences of the Lab, as well as nurturing new and existing partnerships. Prior to her role at the Lab, she managed the Canopy Crew Program for Green Cambridge, as well as interned for the City of Cambridge’s Community Development Department. She is a graduate of Northeastern University’s Three Seas Program, and received both her MS and BS from Northeastern.