Bennington College, Vermont Sunday, July 29 to Friday, August 3, 2012 SUMMER INSTITUTE ON DESCRIPTIVE INQUIRY* to Resist and Re-Imagine Our Educational Terraine
Bennington College, Vermont
July 29 to August 11, 2012
*With the closing of the Prospect Archive and Center for Education and Research, the
institutes formerly known as the Prospect Summer Institutes will be carried forward by a
new organization, The Institute on Descriptive Inquiry Inc. There will continue to be two
institutes, the Institute on Descriptive Process and the Institute on Descriptive Inquiry, and,
as in the recent past, they will be collaboratively planned and facilitated by participants of
the Institute on Descriptive Inquiry.]]>
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Using Descriptive Inquiry
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This summer’s gathering will be an important moment for the Institute with a celebration planned on the mid-Institute weekend (August 4th and 5th) to commemorate the history and good work of the Summer Institutes, and to mark the transition to the new organization. Consider reserving those dates and joining in the celebration if you have any history with the Summer Institutes. Expect information about this special celebration later in the spring.
In August of 2011, the Institute on Descriptive Inquiry held its Structural Planning Meeting. At that meeting, participants adopted by-laws for the corporation. Members present will serve as the first Directors of the corporation. They chose the following officers: Bruce Turnquist, president; Joan Bradbury and Regina Ritscher, vice-presidents; Ellen Schwartz, secretary; Andy Doan, assistant secretary; Neal Wrightson, treasurer. Cecelia Traugh and Bruce Turnquist will co-direct Summer Institutes 2012.
The Board of the Institute on Descriptive Inquiry looks forward to continuing this valued work. As in the past, information will be posted in the spring about registering for the Summer Institutes.
FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT-PROSPECT PRACTITIONER AND RESEARCH FELLOWSHIPS FOR SUMMER 2012
APPLICATION DEADLINE: January 15, 2012 for summer 2012
The Prospect Center closed as a non-profit corporation in December 2010 and gave a gift to the University of Vermont to fund Practitioner and Research Fellowships. The purpose of the fellowships is to encourage educators and researchers to use the Prospect Archives on the site of the University of Vermont.
To learn more about these Fellowships, and to download the application you can go to the following link, or to the Prospect Archive of Children's Work home page side menu, where you can double click on "Research and Practitioner Fellowships."
Research and Practitioner Fellowships Link: http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/getCollection.xql?pid=prospect&title=Prospect%20Archive%20of%20Children%27s%20Work&view=prospectFellowship#a
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It shows researchers where to find items when working with the actual physical Archives at UVM.
For example, in the Contents, you can open the topics under Container List and see the long, detailed list of documents and the container where each document can be found at Special Collections.
Look for the Finding Aid at http://cdi.uvm.edu/findingaids/collection/prospect.ead.xml.
]]>http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/getCollection.xql?pid=prospect&title=Prospect
If you use this url, click on Prospect’s Methodology in the menu to the left.
To go directly to the book, click on:
http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/getCollection.xql?pid=prospect&title=Prospect Archive of Children's Work&view=prospectMethod#a
PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION of Prospect’s Descriptive Processes
Prospect’s Descriptive Processes has been consistently in demand since the book first became available in 2002. For this reason, it seemed imperative to continue to make it widely available even though the Prospect Archives and Center for Education and Research has closed, and the Prospect Archives have been moved to Bailey/Howe Library, Special Collections at the University of Vermont. We are, therefore, delighted to bring you this revised edition now available online for download at no cost. It is important for readers to know this edition includes new content as well as changes designed to provide consistency across processes.
Please be sure to follow Fair Use copyright practices. It is important to give complete credit whenever you use these processes.
We strongly recommend that if you are new to Prospect's disciplined Descriptive Processes, and to the phenomenological premises from which they emerged, that you read From Another Angle: Children’s Strengths and School Standards, edited by Margaret Himley with Patricia F. Carini (Teachers College Press, 2000) and Jenny's Story: Taking the Long View of the Child , Carini P.F., Himley, M., Christine, C., Espinosa, C., and Fournier, J. (Teachers College Press, 2010) before using the processes outlined below. We also highly recommend Starting Strong: A Different Look at Children, Schools, and Standards by Patricia F. Carini (Teachers College Press, 2001). This collection of talks provides the wider context of ideas and values foundational to the processes and relates both to current educational, social, and political issues.
Further resources for reading about the Prospect Archives and Center may be found at Resources link at the UVM website:
We are confident this revised edition of Prospect's Descriptive Processes will continue to provide a valuable alternative to other, more judgmental ways of looking at children's growth and learning as well as ways of documenting curriculum, teaching practice, and schools.
Information about the Prospect Archive, including the files of nine children from the Reference Edition are available on line through the Center for Digital Initiatives, Bailey/Howe Library
website: http://cdi.uvm.edu/collections/getCollection.xql?pid=prospect&title=Prospect
Because it is a newly live collection it is one of the featured collections on the Center for Digital Archives' Web site. This means that the portal to our site currently appears on the CDI home page:
Many thanks to everyone who was involved in making this happen, including the members of the Archives Committee of the Prospect Center; Bruce Turnquist, who acted as liaison between Prospect and Special Collections; and Chris Burns, Robin Katz, and Erica Donnis at the Bailey/Howe Library Special Collections and Center for Digital Initiatives, University of Vermont. Thanks, too, to Heidi Watts for initiating our connection with UVM, which led to finding a home for Prospect's Archives and the creation of the digital site.
We invite you to explore the Web site, to make comments, and certainly, to use it. If you know of people who might be interested in checking out or using the site, please spread the word.
We are excited to see the site up in the public domain. It has been a long-term goal of the Archives Committee to increase access to Prospect's Archives, and Chris Burns of Special Collections feels that the Archive of Children's Work will be a heavily used collection. That is music to our ears!
Ellen Schwartz
]]>Slide rentals will be available through the University of Vermont (UVM), starting in mid-January. Information about how to rent slides will be sent to the listserv and posted on this website once the procedures are finalized by UVM.
You will be able to download Prospect’s Descriptive Processes (the Green Book) in PDF when our website at the University of Vermont Bailey/Howe Library Special Collections website is live. Watch for an announcement of the new website.
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Here’s what one reviewer, Sarah Hudelson of Arizona State University, said about the book: “This detailed portrait of Jenny as person and as learner affirms the assertion that careful observation of one child influences our thinking about all children and the schooling they deserve. Jenny’s Story challenges us to continue the struggle to return children to the center of our teaching.”
Another reviewer, Shirley Brice-Heath of Brown University said, “A splendid book, a long view of children as advocates for justice, empathy and fairness in the world and a testament to the insightful powers of teachers who listen, observe, and wonder at children’s ways of teaching.”
A description of the content of the book, taken from the back cover:
“By carefully documenting how space was made for Jenny-a child who didn’t fit the school mold-this book offers a renewed sense of human possibility and an attainable vision of what schools can be. The authors demonstrate that it is only by attending to each and every child that schooling can begin to achieve its most noble aim: equality. Readers are introduced to Prospect’s educational philosophy and descriptive processes, with details about what the processes are and what they offer teachers, parents, and children. Jenny’s story is told through these processes-ways of looking at children and their work that make it possible to know each child as a person, a thinker, and a learner. While Jenny’s journey through elementary school is the heart of the book, this is also the story of a big urban school serving many immigrant families. Jenny’s Story offers readers a compelling look at:
• How teachers, staff, and the principal successfully worked with a richly
diverse community.
• What it means to ground teaching in knowledge of the particular,
careful observation, and collective inquiry.
• How to challenge school policies and mandates that work against children’s
well-being and dignity.”
Please recommend this book to colleagues: teachers, administrators, and friends; to those you meet or have met at conferences, meetings, and study groups.
Sincerely,
Ann Caren
President
Prospect Board of Trustees
We invite you to write your remembrance of Alice and to post it in comments to this entry. We will collect these and give them to Alice's family.
]]>THE BIG VIEW OF THE CLASSROOM Saturday, November 14th and Sunday, November 15th We hope you can be there! Please continue reading. Download file
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"The Prospect Board recently approved a project, with full agreement and involvemnt of Special Collections at Bailey/Howe Library [at the University of Vermont] to digitize the Reference Edition of the Prospect Archives. This step will greatly expand access to this rich resource for educators at all levels, for historians of American education, and for researchers from a variety of disciplines."
This digitization project has begun.
The University of Vermont is the only entity permitted to digitize slides from the Reference Edition.
Slides from the Reference Edition of the Prospect Archives can be rented from The Prospect Center, prospectcenter@sover.net . Prospect's telephone number is 802 442 8333.
]]>Dear members and friends of Prospect and former Prospect students and families,
The Prospect Board of Trustees voted at its annual meeting (October 2008) to set in motion a plan for closing Prospect as a corporate entity. The plan is to be carried out over a two-year period to permit the financial and legal business of the corporation to be brought to orderly closure. During this period Prospect projects now in progress will be completed and the Prospect website, the online Prospect Review, Prospect’s annual Fall Conference, and rental of slides of children’s collections from the Reference Edition will continue. The single immediate change is that Prospect will cease forthwith to be a membership organization or to conduct an Annual Campaign. The actual dissolution of the corporation will occur in October 2010.
The projects now in progress are as exciting as ever – and as hope-filled. The Prospect Board initiated a long-range plan to produce a series of books with the aim of making Prospect’s ideas, philosophy, and descriptive methodology more widely available. The results to date are the following three books: From Another Angle (now in its 6th printing), Starting Strong, and Prospect’s Descriptive Processes. Both From Another Angle and Starting Strong have been translated into Japanese and Chinese. Jenny’s Story: Prospect’s Philosophy in Action, the fourth book, is under contract with Teachers College Press and to be published in 2009. All chapters of the fifth volume, with the working title Making Space for Children, are drafted, and we will submit a prospectus for the final book in the series this coming spring (2009).
The Prospect Archives, gifted to UVM Special Collections in 2006, is entering a new and forward looking phase in its development. The Prospect Board recently approved a project, with full agreement and involvement of Special Collections at Bailey/Howe Library, to digitize the Reference Edition of the Prospect Archives. This step will greatly expand access to this rich resource for educators at all levels, for historians of American education, and for researchers from a variety of disciplines. We are very pleased to have the archives in a safe and accessible space, available for future teachers and researchers.
With Prospect projects and activities as vital as ever, why close? There is still sufficient money to continue more or less as usual. There certainly isn’t a dearth of ideas. What has happened is that after 18 years of doing all that Prospect does on solely volunteer labor, and after deep thought and lengthy discussion spanning several years, the Board was forced to recognize that lacking the financial resources adequate to hire a director and support staff, this corporate structure was not sustainable and had been stretched to the breaking point. It was important to all on the Board not to have Prospect simply dwindle away. The decision to implement a plan that would allow Prospect to close with dignity followed from that resolve.
Does this mean there will be no more Prospect after October 2010? It does not. Though Prospect will no longer exist as a corporate structure, Prospect work will go on. It will continue through the use of its resources now safely housed at Special Collections, Bailey/Howe Library Chris.Burns@uvm.edu. It will continue through the influence of the books that preserve and make available in ever widening circles its intellectual and educational philosophy. It will continue through the many local inquiry groups and summer institutes that meet at locations across the country to do Descriptive Reviews of Children, of Children’s Works, and of the Work and Art of Teaching. Most especially Prospect will continue through the lives and in the hands of the many who have been influenced by Prospect since Prospect School opened in 1965.
We take this opportunity to offer heartfelt thanks to all our donors for contributions, large and small, that have helped to sustain Prospect for the past 43 years and most especially to make Prospect’s ideas, teaching, and Descriptive Processes accessible to the larger educational community. We thank with equal gratitude each and every one of you for your commitment to the ideas and philosophy that make Prospect what it is and will continue to be. We know that Prospect has made and will continue to make a significant contribution to the larger movements for educational change, with its bold proposition that it is only by attending with care to each child that the noble aim of equality of education for all children can be achieved.
If you have questions about the closing or about continuing activities and projects, please contact Ann Caren (acaren@twcny.rr.com) (607.257.7959).
Sincerely,
Ann Caren
President of the Prospect Board of Trustees
Patricia F. Carini and Louis Carini
Prospect Incorporators
New York, NY
The Elementary Teachers Network
2008 - 2009 Worktime Inquiry Study Group
When: Sat. Feb. 7, Tues. Mar. 3, Sat. April 4, Sat. May 2 (CUE Conference at LIU), and Tues. May 12
Where: Central Park East I School, E. Harlem
Contact: Elaine Avidon--eavidon@aol.com
Other: We have been meeting for 17 years. This year's seminar focuses on the visibility of the child and the connections and choices we make in relation to our growing understandings of children as workers, persons, and learners. We are exploring the possibilities inherent in particular materials—wood, print making, soft sculpture, blocks, sand, paint—using our own worktime experiences with these materials during the class and the experiences of our students to consider the implications for teaching and learning. The group is co-led by Elaine Avidon, Jane Andrias, Erin Hyde, and Yvonne Smith.
New York, NY
Saturday Inquiry Group
When: Feb. 9, April 25
Where: Lehman College
Contact: Andy Doan--andy.doan@calhoun.org
Other: We have been meeting for 17 years. The work of this group is built around a shared reading, which is put alongside practice. This year the group is reading is John Dewey and the Philosophy and Practice of Hope by Fishman and McCarthy
Central VT
Inquiry Group
Who: teachers, teacher educators, education students
When: once a month, Friday January 23, Thursday February 12, Friday March 13, Friday April 3, Friday May 8. Friday meetings begin at 3:30, Thursday February 12 begins at 4:00
Where: River Rock School, Montpelier, VT EXCEPT Thursday February 12 which will be at either River Rock School or Johnson State College
Contact: Gina Ritscher-Winters--Regina.Ritscher-Winters@jsc.edu or Allison Caldwell--akcaldwell@comcast.net
Other: We do Descriptive Reviews of children, work, and practice in relationship to the River Rock School.
Chicago, IL
Teachers' Study Group
Who: Participants come from Chicago and vicinity and include teachers, retired teachers, administrators and teacher educators.
When: 10 a.m.-noon, the first Saturday of each month, October - May, skipping
January (February 7, March 7, April 4, May 2)
Where: Francis Parker School, usually in Mary Anne Hamilton's classroom
Contact: Joan Bradbury--joanbradbury@gmail.com
Other: We have been meeting for 5 years now. We use the Prospect descriptive inquiry processes, usually beginning the year with each person bringing a recollection or arising concern from the beginning of school. In the last couple of years, we've had a loose "theme" running through the year, one around children's questions, and last year's around children's choices.
VT, NH, NY State, Western MA
Saturday Inquiry Group
Who: educators in a variety of settings, from nursery school through college
When: 9:15 a.m.-12:15, once a month, Sept. through May
Where: Hiland Hall School, Shaftsbury, VT
Contact: Ellen Schwartz--eschwa1@verizon.net
Feburary 7: Discussion of Reading: "The Tyranny of Petty Coercion," by
Marilynne Robinson (in The Death of Adam)
March 7: Descriptive Review of a Child
April 4: Narrative Reports
May 2: Descriptive Review of Practice or Review of an Activity
Philadelphia, PA
Philadelphia Teachers' Learning Cooperative
Who: educators from Philadelphia and surrounding suburbs
When: 4:45 - 6:45 Every Thursday during the school year (except school holidays)
Where: Participant's homes. Come early for conversation and refreshments
Contact: Betsy Wice--BetsyWice@aol.com
Website: www.ptlcteacherspace.blogspot.com
Other: We have been meeting for thirty years.
January 15: Review of Practice
January 22: Discussion of Draft Chapter of Inviting Families: A Teacher Remembers
January 29: Descriptive Review, 4th Grader
February 5: Descriptive Review of Work: 8th Grade Student
February 12: Descriptive Review: Adult Mentoring
February 19: Description of Four Works, 7th & 8th Graders
February 26: Children Adapting to New Routines: “That’s not how Teacher Gill Does It!”
March 5: Discussion of a portion of Whatever It Takes by Peter Tough (about Harlem Children’s Zone)
March 12: Where Am I Now in My Work?
March 19: Planning Meeting
March 26: Post-Its™ and Other Things We Make with our Kids (Bring Post-Its™ and other supplies that fit into a shoebox)
Bronxville/Yonkers, NY
The Art of Teaching: Teaching and Learning for the Classroom Professional
Who: Sarah Lawrence College Art of Teaching alum and host teachers as well as other interested educators, including teachers, administrators, etc. Focus is mainly early childhood and elementary school.
When: Four or five Saturdays over the academic year.
Where: Sarah Lawrence College
Contact: Mary Hebron (Assoc. Director, Art of Teaching Graduate Program, SLC) -- mhebron@slc.edu
Other: The fee is $25 per Saturday. There is one SLC credit offered for attendance at all of a series, for an additional cost of $100. Though the series began in December, we have included the schedule for future sessions.
February 7: Prospect Descriptive Review of a Child
March 7: Prospect Review of Practice
April 25: Making teaching work visible