The Connecticut Writing Project invites you to attend a day of workshops with Harvard’s Doris Sommer, author of The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (Duke UP 2014) and creator of Pre-Texts, “a fun and flexible teacher training program that develops high order literacy and citizenship by using complex texts as prompts for making art.”
Professor Sommer will run two workshops on Friday, September 30, this first from 10 to 12 and the second from 1 to 3, in the North Reading Room of the Wilbur Cross Building. The morning workshop will be for participation, and the afternoon for training in facilitation. Participants will attend both workshops, and lunch will be provided by Lizzie Searing of Taking Care of Tummies.
Please contact Connecticut Writing Project Director Jason Courtmanche at jason.courtmanche@uconn.edu to register. We will accept the first 25 registrants.
Support and funding provided by the Connecticut Writing Project, the English Department’s Speakers Fund, the Equity and Social Justice Committee of the Neag School of Education’s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, and the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center.
What is “Pre-Texts”?
Pre-Texts is a teacher-training program and a flexible approach to teaching that uses art-making to engage challenging literary texts, fostering three integrated areas of development—literacy, critical and innovative thinking, and citizenship.
The Pre-Texts website: http://www.pre-texts.org/
For more information about Doris Sommer and Pre-Texts, check out the following links:
The Harvard Gazette: http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2013/08/the-story-deepens/
The Boston Globe: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/08/23/somali-american-helps-others-adjust-life-states/depiMrVLUQlj83E2LC5EMM/story.html
Doris Sommer, Director of the Cultural Agents Initiative at Harvard University, is Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies. Her academic and outreach work promotes development through arts and humanities, specifically through “Pre-Texts” in Boston Public Schools, throughout Latin America, and beyond. Pre-Texts is an arts-based training program for teachers of literacy, critical thinking, and citizenship. Among her books are Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991) about novels that helped to consolidate new republics; Proceed with Caution when Engaged by Minority Literature (1999) on a rhetoric of particularism; Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (2004); and The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (2014). Sommer has enjoyed and is dedicated to developing good public school education. She has a B.A. from New Jersey's Douglass College for Women, and Ph.D. from Rutgers University.
Professor Sommer’s faculty page: http://scholar.harvard.edu/dsommer/home
For more information, contact: Jason Courtmanche at jason.courtmanche@uconn.edu