Embedded Files
The Institute on Descriptive Inquiry offers a day long fall conference in New York City and conducts two residential summer institutes on the Hampshire College campus in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Tuition support and local day camps may help make possible your participation in the Summer Institute. Click the buttons below for more information about those options.
Get introduced or reconnected to descriptive processes that allow us to look deeply at the words and work of children and youth in order to strengthen our capacity to teach and learn alongside them.
Many educators work in contexts where we face pressure to view our students through a deficit lens. This is often amplified when families’ race, language, immigration status, educational attainment, etc. are offered as a justification for why learners struggle in our schools. Engage in reflective recollections, close reading, and descriptive reviews of children and their work to create a counter-narrative, one in which the strengths of youth, families, and teachers are made visible, which supports us in building authentic, mutual relationships.
The Summer Institute on Descriptive Process can be an introduction to descriptive processes, or may serve to deepen understanding of them.
The Institute explores the many ways children and youth express their ideas about the world through activities, words, and works. The Institute’s work rests on close observation and description, giving teachers an opportunity to look at children’s (and their own) works from multiple perspectives, while also serving as a way of considering connections to and implications for teacher practice, curriculum, school policy, and assessment.
The Summer Institute on Descriptive Inquiry, brings together teachers, parents and others who are familiar with descriptive processes.
Participants share a commitment to creating classrooms and schools where all children, and all people, are valued. As they work from their experiences, ideas and questions, those who attend participate in spanning studies of children and works, philosophical inquiry and in depth study of the descriptive processes. The institute has two major components: the major seminar and independent work/small group inquiries.
All these gatherings are committed to recognizing and lifting up the capacity of each person. Sharing a vision that starts and builds from students’ and teachers’ strengths, members and friends of the Institute seek to reinvigorate their own practice and sense for what is possible.
While some educators return to these descriptive gatherings from year to year, we extend a warm welcome to newcomers. Our top priority is to expand and diversify participation in our offerings. Expansion means that there are more educators speaking out for democratic values and schools responsive to children. Diversity of all kinds immeasurably adds to and strengthens that message.
Page updated
Report abuse