See you in June!
Join us on campus during the week of June 19, 2022. Registration is now open.
Join us on campus during the week of June 19, 2022. Registration is now open.
Dear ELI friends,
After a prolonged COVID-19 hiatus, we’re excited to invite you to join the sixth Environmental Literature Institute at Phillips Exeter Academy. ELI is a transformative experience that will expand your thinking about environmental education and revitalize your work with students and colleagues. This week-long institute aims to cultivate a community of educators interested in environmentally-focused teaching and learning. ELI foregrounds how the methods and approaches of disciplines in the Humanities, including among others English, Language Arts, Foreign Language Study, History, and Philosophy, can enhance environmental learning. The various workshops, speakers, and events will offer rich ideas for teachers in all disciplines, including the natural and social sciences.
When we gather this June, it will have been three years since we were last together, three years and a world of upheavals since we walked beside the Exeter River with the extraordinary poet and scholar Alison Hawthorne Deming. We think often of the poem Alison wrote during that ELI field excursion and how her words then seemed prescient to where we are today. You can read Alison's poem in Scientific American HERE.
As we think about our own teaching and its evolution since the onset of the pandemic, we’re struck by how much more frequently we’re “pulling threads of hope” and attempting to (re)weave them with our students into webs of connection. We find ourselves leaning fully into both joy and grief with our students. We're quicker to celebrate with them the myriad delights, big and small, that emerge even in the face of so much chaos, pain, and loss. We’re quicker to search for moments of connection in the classroom and beyond it. And we're quicker too to allow space for grief (our students' and our own), and for approaching our classrooms as shelters where we can be more fully human together. The pedagogy of joy, and the pedagogy of loss: the two go hand and hand. We've found how necessary it is to let go of those things that keep us from our humanity: grades, rigor, notions of “excellence.” To echo the great Indian author Arundhati Roy, we believe the pandemic can be a portal to a world that is more just, sustainable, and joyful. Yet despite our individual best efforts, the machinery of rigor grinds on. That is why this work must be collective.
In that spirit, never more than now do we need teachers who are committed to this possibility, and we are hopeful that ELI will provide the space and time for such teachers to come together. Our goal for ELI 2022 is to center joy, connection, and renewal, and to that end, we are excited that Sarah Jaquette Ray will join us as our Keynote Speaker. Sarah’s work focuses on the psychological and emotional dimensions of being human in this time of multiple interlocking crises, and her most recent book, A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, offers practical and philosophical strategies for both students and their teachers. And we are welcoming BACK to ELI a team of alumni into leadership roles–Christie Beveridge Howell, Charley Mull, Katie Forrestall, and Dr. Susee Witt.
We hope you will consider joining us for your professional development work this summer. We can say without hesitation that working with this community of teachers has been one of the highlights of our professional careers. The work this community is doing in the realm of environmental education feels important, deep, and relevant right now. More so than ever. For many of our leaders and participants, ELI has become an intellectual home, and we hope it will become yours, too.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out via email. In the meantime, for a detailed glimpse of what we’ve been up to at past Institutes, please see Michael Brosnan’s blog piece about ELI 2017 and our ASLE news pieces from ELI 2019, ELI 2018, ELI 2017, and ELI 2016. Additionally, participant feedback from past ELI’s will help provide a sense of how powerful the ELI experience has been for attending educators.
Sincerely, Jason and Stephen
2022 ELI Leadership Team
Jason BreMiller, ELI Director, Phillips Exeter Academy
Dr. Stephen Siperstein, ELI Assistant Director, Choate Rosemary Hall
Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, Keynote Speaker and Workshop Leader
Dr. Susee Witt, The College Preparatory School
Christie Beveridge Howell, UP for Learning
Charley Mull, Worcester Academy
The institute will offer resources to help participants develop their courses as well as networking tools to foster professional development. Our vision is for you to experience the conversations, workshops, and field experiences needed to nourish your teaching. If you are looking to build a new course or program from the ground up; if you are interested in refining curriculum for an existing course or program; or if you’ve ever craved the opportunity to connect with other teachers who care deeply about environmental education, then ELI is for you.
ELI is open to any middle, secondary, or post-secondary educator. While ELI signals an English-specific approach, it is a professional development experience inclusive of all educational contexts, forms, and disciplines. In the past, we have welcomed teachers from English, Science, Art, Foreign Language, and History Departments. We also welcome Administrators, Sustainability Coordinators, and Outdoor Educators. We believe the experience is enriched by these multi-disciplinary encounters. In order to enhance cross-disciplinary and intra-institutional dialogue, some schools have elected to send multiple colleagues from the same school, including colleagues from various departments. In past years, some of the courses represented by ELI attendees have included:
In order to optimize contact time with Institute Leaders and to nurture a creative, idea-inspiring culture, the number of institute participants will be limited to 30. The schedule for the week will include the following:
Harkness Conversations: A formal introduction to Harkness pedagogy will frame our time together and inform our approach to group conversations throughout the week. You will leave with a fundamental understanding of Harkness methodology and significant practice time. You will also have access to Exeter Harkness resources and the chance for follow-up conversations if you would like to learn more.
Keynote Address: Drew Lanham will give this year’s Keynote Address on Monday evening and will lead a workshop on Tuesday morning.
Explorations: ELI Explorations are designed to help you connect with the local area, to place you in your students’ shoes as learners, and to model the sorts of field trips possible in your own courses. You will be able to CHOOSE from a handful of local field trips. Past trips have included explorations to: a local biodynamic farm; Rye Beach; campus Sustainability Tour; Packer’s Falls; team building at a high ropes course.
Cross Pollinations: Taking Gary Paul Nabhan’s idea of “cross pollination” as our cue, we will devote a portion of each day to collaborating together on individual course or curriculum projects. This time will afford you the flexibility to engage individually with conference leaders, to leverage the diverse expertise of other Institute attendees, and to engage with your colleagues in the creative joys of course building and planning.
Presentations and Workshops: You will have the opportunity to CHOOSE from an array of workshops facilitated by members of the ELI leadership team. Past sessions have included:
Clare Walker Leslie’s, Drawing for Observation
Scott Russell Sanders, Taking Care of Home: Sustainability on a Finite Planet
John Elder and Scott Russell Sanders’, Teaching Frost in Place
Siobhan Senier’s, Environmental Literary Stewardship Online
Stephen Siperstein’s, Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities; Envisioning Eco-Futures: Teaching Cli-Fi and the Environmental Humanities; AND Playing with Climate Change
Patrick Thomas’ introduction to environmental publishing
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s, The Honorable Harvest AND Reading the Landscape
Rochelle Johnson’s, Making your Place your Pedagogy; Thoreau’s Place in Environmental Literature; AND Thoreau for the Anthropocene
Annie Merrill’s, Environmental Justice AND Natural History
Mindi Messmer’s Water Quality in seacoast New Hampshire, in Introduction to Environmental Justice
Laird Christensen’s, Placemaking
Race, Class, Toxicity, and Slow Violence: Environmental Justice Today
Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder’s, Multi-Genre Nature Writing
Linda Hogan’s, Writing in the Field
Take-home Texts: We will assemble for you a collection of books written by members of ELI’s leadership team or provided by our sponsors. Examples include, Mark Long’s, Teaching North American Environmental Literature and Stephen Siperstein’s, Teaching Climate Change in the Humanities.
Informal Social Gatherings: Perhaps ELI’s greatest boon, you will participate in both ELI and conference-wide social gatherings that will provide significant networking and community-building opportunities.
ELI is fortunate to have the support of ASLE (The Association of Literature and the Environment), ORION Magazine, Milkweed Editions, The Hopper, and Allagash Brewing Company. In addition to the standard items covered in the registration fee (see General Information), ELI participants will enjoy the following items to enhance their immersion in the environmental humanities:
Two-Year ASLE Membership that includes:
One-year membership to ORION magazine that includes:
Copy of The Hopper magazine
Selected texts from Milkweed Editions
Previous selections have included Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Gary Paul Nabhan’s Cross-Pollinations, Amy Leach’s Things That Are; Drew Lanham’s The Home Place.
Middle Schools
Secondary Schools
Colleges
Past ELI Keynote Speakers
Past Master Teachers in Residence
Other Past Workshop Leaders
Lauren Rosen, Conference Manager
lrosen@exeter.edu
603-777-4471
Jason BreMiller, Director
jbremiller@exeter.edu
845-705-4453
Mailing Address
Phillips Exeter Academy
20 Main Street
Exeter, NH 03833
The most intellectually and personally fulfilling professional development experience I've ever had … ELI gave me theoretical grounding and practical methods for updating my curriculum, and the sense of community to do so with energy and hope."ELI Participant, Atlanta, GA