BLTN at 20: Encouraging and Celebrating Learning

Professor and Bread Loaf Teacher Network Director, Dixie Goswami describes the fundamentals of the network:

Celebrating 20 Years of Inside and Outside Support

The contributions of BLTN teachers and their students have built and sustained the network since it was founded in 1993, and their gifts range widely: the time they spend working with each other online and in person; the money they spend to travel to each other’s schools and communities; their work as community organizers, advocates, writers and publishers; the conference fees, airfares, and other expenses that come from their own pockets; and the summers that they spend in Vermont, Oxford, Santa Fe, and Asheville—summers they spent in Juneau and in Mexico—and the months and years between. Increasingly, students in BLTN classrooms are members of and contributors to BLTN.  BLSE faculty contributions to BLTN range from the intellectual and pedagogical richness of their Bread Loaf courses to their engagement with Bread Loaf teachers and their students as they read literary texts, among other activities.

Many partnerships, private and public funders, and generous individuals support BLTN teachers at Bread Loaf, in their communities and classrooms, and in countless ways, including Middlebury College, the Wallace Foundation, Rockefeller, Carnegie, National Endowment for the Humanities, C.E.& S. Foundation, Write to Change Foundation, Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, Ohio Department of Education, School District of Greenville County, SC; Kentucky State Department of Education, Phillips Academy/Andover Bread Loaf Writing Workshop, the Navajo Nation, Fidelity Foundation, Promise of Learnings, Inc., and The Bingham Trust.

Since 1993, hundreds of outstanding public school teachers have received support for graduate study at BLSE and to participate year-round in BLTN. Thousands of their students have participated and continue to participate in BLTN activities.