For application information for the 2010 Sue Rose Summer Institute for Teachers, click here.
To view the "Thank a Teacher" Teachers Academy video, click here.
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, programs and conferences for school teachers throughout the year but its cornerstone event is this yearly Summer Institute for Teachers--a two-summer sequence of three-week, multi-cultural, interdisciplinary 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.
The 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 requests a $300 fee from each participant's school or district. The Dallas Institute's scholarship to each participant is approximately $5,000.00 per summer; this includes books and materials as well as breakfast, lunch and break snacks each day of the program.
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 $8,000.00 per summer.
The Epic Tradition: Literature as a Mode of Knowledge
At the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture
July 5 - 23, 2010
In a world subject to half-understood cultural forces and major uncertainties, it is crucial for us teachers to understand the shaping power of the largest structures of imagination on nations and peoples: the epic vision. The lives of today's students will almost certainly be marked by the difficult transition into new cultural forms, and there is no better guide than great epic works.
Epic lays down the imaginative coordinates of the cosmos to be earned and then inhabited. To read epics - as the teachers in this program will find-is to confront again and again the destruction of static orders and the remaking of whole worlds. Not only does the experience break open old assumptions, it widens the heart to new possibilities.
Works studied typically include: Epic of Gilgamesh, Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, West African Mwindo Epic, Divine Comedy, Moby Dick, Exodus; Excerpts from: Paradise Lost, Ramayana, the Native American coyote myth, Popol Vuh; Excerpts from historical and philosophical writers: Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr.