Artists, writers, school leaders, paraprofessionals—oh my!
This week (July 6-10), CUSP welcomes a full house. Connecting Oceans Academy is presenting a graduate course on art and reflective practices to be used in K-12 classrooms. Twenty-seven teachers representing a variety of school districts, grade levels and content areas are bent over pencil, paper, scissors and paint as course instructor Dr. Virginia Freyermuth circles the room.
Freyermuth is a local artist, a former Massachusetts Teacher of the Year, and recipient of the Massachusetts Art Educator of the Year Award. Her week-long summer course at CUSP in partnership with Connecting Oceans Academy is the most popular course of the year.
Each day, Freyermuth guides the teachers through artistic and creative writing prompts. Then in the afternoon, she leads them to nearby coastal and historic sites to gather inspiration and create art outside. Later today, they will bus to New Bedford to paint the harbor.
Meanwhile, down the hall, a handful of ‘buzzards’ or instructors from the Buzzards Bay Writing Project (a site of the National Writing Project) are churning their creative juices in their office.
The Buzzard Bay Writing Project’s two-week summer camp for students entering grades 5-10 started this morning at Jospeh Case Junior High School in Swansea, and their 2009 Invitational Summer Institute for teachers is starting tomorrow, July 7.
The Institute witll teach teachers how to teach writing—an increasingly important and increasingly difficult task in today’s schools.
The teachers in the Institute will participate in a gamut of writing exercises, prompts and challenges to refine their own writing, and the ‘buzzards’ will help them to develop lesson plans and strategies for teaching writing.
Then—to add to the liveliness at CUSP—around the corner from the ‘buzzards’, former Freetown-Lakeville superintendent of schools, Steve Furtado, is leading a seminar on administrative policies and procedures for teachers working toward their principal licensure in our Leading for Learning program.
And tonight, paraprofessionals working toward their bachelor’s degrees and teacher licensure in elementary education and moderate disabilities in our Journey into Education and Teaching (JET) program will arrive for their summer course.
