THE TEACHERS ACADEMY

Since 1983, the Teachers Academy has educated and reinvigorated teachers for their classroom work, giving teachers the respect that their profession deserves while it challenges their intellect and deepens their skills.  Teachers Academy classes and events, especially the Summer Institutes for Teachers, have influenced hundreds of teachers, and by extension, thousands of young people.

The First Annual Summer Institute Alumni Symposium
THE HERO AND THE UNDERWORLD
A Symposium for Teachers
Conducted by Summer Institute Alumni and Fellows of the Dallas Institute

Alumni of the Summer Institute for Teachers have a rare and privileged intellectual tradition.  In our studies, we have been shown that in spite of the grief and chaos throughout history, human experience has meaning and value.  Our experience in the Summer Institutes has further revealed that literature provides a unique mode of knowing this human mystery, a way of knowing not scientific or historical, but a way more expansive and not constrained by the theories du jour.

To honor this rich intellectual heritage, the Teachers Academy announces its First Annual Summer Institute Alumni Symposium, a university-style academic conference open to full-time school teachers.  Presenters and attendees will hear Summer Institute Alumni deliver brief academic essays that engage literary texts in the thoughtful and rigorous manner modeled in the Summer Institutes on the topic of "The Hero and the Underworld."

Friday, February 9, 6 - 9:00 pm - Saturday, February 10, 8:30 - 2:30 pm
Register by January 29
$40 fee includes dinner Friday, breakfast and lunch Saturday, and published monograph of presentations.
 

Here's what the participants have to say about the Symposium

"Every time I come to the Dallas Institute, I am reminded just how much I love to learn and teach.  No matter how exhausting the day or the week, time at the Institute challenges and reinvigorates the soul and the mind."

"This event holds more importance than I can adequately express on paper."

"I would have left the classroom long ago had it not been for the powerful spirit of the Summer Institute and other Teachers Academy events!!"

"Although I came as a spectator, I was encouraged to see so many people engaged in the great 'conversation' of life."

"Thank you so much for the opportunity to expand and stretch my imagination in such an accepting and welcoming atmosphere."

"I am reminded of the noble work that I do as a teacher.  I learn so much every time I come here, and I am renewed and inspired."

"There is not a day that goes by (as I stand in front of my students) that I do not go back to the ideas, the works, the practices learned at the Teachers Academy."

"I am very excited about the energy and the welcome in this atmosphere and I will be back soon."

"The Dallas Institute kept me in the profession of teaching when I saw no hope for the Dallas schools back in 1985 and what I learned has given me strength to teach still."

"These opportunities invigorate our souls."

"In a place like this, we can come together and revitalize that spark that inspired us once long ago.  This must continue."

"This was such an inviting, enlightening atmosphere for both the novice and expert.  It feels good to learn!"

"The Teachers Academy provides a breath of fresh air that nurtures me directly and indirectly benefits my students."

"Yearly attendance at a conference like this is a sort of prescription against burnout.  Thank you for your both unique and important work."

"The Institute fills a void for teachers."

"It's truly nourishing for the soul, and it's great to bring this revitalized enthusiasm into the classroom for our students."

Dinner and a Movie for Teachers

Schoolteachers who are alumni of the Teachers Academy programs are invited to gather for an evening of community with food for the body and mind.  Alumni from the 1989-1994 Summer Institutes will be especially recognized and honored.  After dinner, Dr. Louise Cowan will deliver some remarks to be followed by viewing and discussing a film in the Teachers Academy tradition.

Wednesday, May 16, 6-9:30 pm
Please reply by May 14
Free Admission for TA Alumni; Teacher's guests $10
Register now
 

The Summer Institute for Teachers

Applications for the 2007 Summer Institute for Teachers are now being accepted!  Application Deadline: April 21, 2007  (Dallas ISD Master Teachers, see special details in #11 below)
Dallas ISD Master Teacher Application Deadline, May 7, 2007
See details below.

A Brief History of the Summer Institutes
The Teachers Academy of the Dallas Institute was conceived in 1983 with the "Summer Institute"--a literature class for high school English teachers sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and that called the class a "model for the nation."

The Teachers Academy program at the Dallas Institute offers classes and conferences for school teachers throughout the year but its cornerstone event is the yearly Summer Institute for Teachers--a two-summer sequence of three-week, multi-cultural, multi-disciplinary literature courses held at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.  In even-numbered years, the course is "The Epic Tradition: Literature as a Mode of Knowledge" and in odd-numbered years, the course is "Tragedy and Comedy: Literature as a Mode of Knowledge."  Teachers are encouraged to attend both summers but they may take one or both classes.

Summer Institute convenes each July for fifteen weekday classes, from 8:45 am - 4:00 pm.  Mornings are given over to a lecture on the reading material for the day and a two-hour seminar exploring the work in detail, trying out ideas and approaches.  Afternoon schedules vary to include guest lectures, films and discussions, panels, and writing.  Journal writings and a weekly in-class essay are expected of every participant; for those seeking graduate credit, a longer, carefully written essay submitted one week after the course concludes is required.

The Dallas Institute's scholarship to each participant is approximately $3,700.00 per summer; this includes books and materials as well as breakfast, lunch and break snacks each day of the program.  (The Dallas Institute requests a $250 fee from each participant's school or district.)

The University of Dallas also provides a full-tuition scholarship to qualified applicants who apply to earn the 6 hours of graduate credit available for each of the two summer classes.  This makes the total scholarship package available to school teachers approximately $6,730.00 per summer.

Purposes and Aims of the Summer Institutes:

• to offer K-12 school teachers in the Dallas area a transforming encounter with major literary classics underlying world culture

• to establish a community of teachers who understand the formative role of the humanities in the life of culture

• to foster a way of reading appropriate to the form of the work

• to enable participants to study this body of material not so much as an instruction in competency as an experience in understanding

• to center attention on the works themselves, with secondary materials used as aids, models, and references rather than as final authorities

• to provide a coherent approach to recurrent themes and images in the literary tradition through a focusing on major genres (epic, tragedy, and comedy)

• to offer participants the opportunity to work with a dedicated and experienced faculty in lectures, discussions, workshops, and written expression

• to strengthen the critical and imaginative powers of participants and hence increase their inner authority in the classroom as teachers in all disciplines

• to strengthen participants' higher cognitive skills in reading, thinking, writing, and speaking and thereby to increase their own effectiveness in the classroom

The 24th Annual Summer Institute for Teachers Presents:
Tragedy and Comedy: Literature as a Mode of Knowledge

At the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture
July 2 - 20, 2007
Weekdays, 8:45 am - 4:00 pm

The dramatic forms associated with the terms tragedy and comedy originated with the ancient Greeks, but tragic and comic human actions are universal.  When a crisis reveals an irreconcilable conflict in a city or culture, tragedy proves to be inseparable from the hero or heroine who both confronts and embodies the city's division.  Not an outer problem but an inner self-contradiction, the tragic impasse gradually opens onto the unsparing landscape of mystery, the stony place of sacrifice and death.

In tragedy, the community achieves wisdom only through the most painful suffering.  In comedy, by contrast, fate is transformed into happy chance, and the community, spared the utmost test, finds a way to restore itself without the ultimate violence.  By exposing its follies and uniting its opposites through the mercies of a comic action, the community heals its inner contradictions at least with justice, but in its more generous reaches with laughter, gratitude, and joy.  Its most profound governing image is not sacrifice but the marriage feast.

Because comedy and tragedy exist as fundamental possibilities of human action rather than simply as literary models, tragedies and comedies occur in many different cultures, in many different media.  Although this course focuses on tragedy and comedy primarily as they appear in the medium of drama, it also examines films and novels.  Authors to be studied in the 2007 Tragedy and Comedy class include Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Federico García Lorca, Wole Soyinka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Toni Morrison.

APPLICATION INFORMATION
Application Deadline: April 21, 2007 (Dallas ISD Master Teachers, see special details in #11 below)
Dallas ISD Master Teacher Application Deadline, May 7, 2007
Selection of Participants

• Applicants should be full-time, K-12 school teachers.  Interested administrators also make up a portion of each summer class.  Dallas ISD Master Teachers are eligible to apply for the course.  This class is approved for 14 hours of mandatory professional development credit by the Dallas ISD and will appear in the 2007 summer Dallas ISD catalog of professional development.

• Applicants should plan to devote their full time to the Institute when it is in session and commit to reading the suggested works before the class begins.

• Preference will be given to those who demonstrate an eagerness for submitting to the study of literature at its deepest possible level, not to those whose interests lie in applying the critical theories du jour.  The success of the class depends upon the willingness of the participants to engage openly with the primary works, upon the participants' willingness to be changed and even transformed by the wisdom of the work at hand.

Application Requirements:
Email the following information to Dr. Claudia Allums - callums@dallasinstitute.org

Dallas ISD Master Teachers are eligible to apply for the course.  This class is approved for 14 hours of mandatory professional development credit by the Dallas ISD and will appear in the 2007 summer Dallas ISD catalog of professional development.

1. Name, home address, telephone number, and email.  (Email will be the primary means of correspondence between the applicant and the Director of the Teachers Academy.  We're trying to save trees!)

2. A statement that the applicant will devote his/her full time to the class when it is in session and read the recommended works before the program begins.  (Please, no doctor's appointments or other engagements--professional or personal--during class hours.)

3. College degree(s) held by the applicant.

4. Number of years in full-time teaching.

5. Name and address of the school where applicant currently teaches.

6. Department in the school where the applicant currently teaches.

7. Courses currently taught.

8. If formerly employed as a teacher, the name of the previous school(s) and courses that the applicant has taught.

9. Whether or not the applicant will apply to (or is currently enrolled in) the University of Dallas to earn 6 hours of graduate credits for the class.  Teachers who wish to earn credit to apply to a degree at another university should fill out the application as a "Special Student" only.  (An additional application and a $40 fee are required by the University of Dallas.  Go to http://www.udallas.edu/braniff/apply.cfm for application information.  The University of Dallas offers the Summer Institute courses tuition-free to full-time school teachers.)

10. An indication of which Orientation Meeting the applicant will attend: Sunday, May 20, 2007, from 2 - 4:00 pm, or Monday, May 21, 2007, from 6 - 8:00 pm.  (At the Orientation Meeting, applicants will receive all the books and reading materials assigned for the class.)

11. Upon acceptance, a letter of confirmation from the applicant's supervisor agreeing to make a cost-sharing contribution of $250, remitted no later than the first day of class in July.

    Dallas ISD teachers are exempt from this step.  Instead, for #11 of this application, these Dallas ISD Master Teacher applicants need to list their employee identification number.  After informing Dallas ISD Master Teachers of their acceptance in the class, the Dallas Institute will enroll the Dallas ISD teachers in the class for professional development credit directly through the Dallas ISD Office of Staff Development.

12. A narrative description (of no more than 2, double-spaced pages) of the applicant's background and reasons for wanting to participate in the program.