Finding Fertile Ground under Sterile or Oppressive Structures: 

The Liberatory Potential of Descriptive Inquiry

We are living in dangerous and uncertain times. War, genocide, the rise of fascism, and global climate change loom over our daily lives and form the backdrop of our collective consciousness. In schools in the U.S., educators face evolving restrictions on professional autonomy and practice: censorship of ideas and practice, the Science of Reading, and mandated computer-based curriculum for young children, among them. The rapid introduction of AI poses many questions for educators about how we help young people learn, how we decipher what is true, and even the role of humanity in teaching and learning. In short, we face existential questions as people and educators. 

           How in today’s context can descriptive inquiry help us uncover and connect with more authentic humanness and nurture creative expression in our spaces of teaching and learning? How can we nourish ourselves, our students, and our communities through this practice during these incredibly challenging times? How can our practice help us bear witness to truth, in our places of work and beyond? How can descriptive inquiry help us keep authentic teaching and learning alive? 

What is always fertile are our lives, “unique and irreplaceable,” as poet Traci K. Smith says, the fertile ground of the way we work and play to find the marvelous: justice and liberation, wonder and insight, identity, meaning and purpose, connection and love. Descriptive inquiry is based on trying to see those lives through deep attention and from multiple and generous perspectives in order to support that human valuing, caring, expressing, and acting that unfold in them. Descriptive inquiry supports these capacities by giving us the time, space, community, and processes to notice, explore, share, and support those human elements. 

Join us this summer, our last at Hampshire College before we find a new home, as we seek to cultivate the fertile ground in our work. 

Past Summer Institute Themes

2001            Taking Care of Childhood, Play, Spirit, and Imagination

2002        Locations of Relationship: Ourselves, Others' Classrooms, Culture

2003        Sustaining Possibility Through Story, Memory, and Imagination

2004        Everyday Life and Our Wildest Dreams: Working Inside Contradictions

2005        The Multiplicities of Democracy

2006        Locating, Designing, Maintaining Spaces for Democratic Community

2007        What Does It Mean to Teach in These Times?

2008        What Do We Hold Dear in Teaching?

2009        Descriptive Inquiry: Coming to Action

2010            Expanding Our Sense of the Possible

2011            Using Descriptive Process to Navigate the New and Difficult Terrain

2012          Using Descriptive Inquiry to Resist and Re-imagine Our Educational Terrain

2013            The Capacity of the Person Within Culture   

2014          Supporting the Capacity of the Person Through Community 

2015           Expanding Horizons, Combining Perspectives           

2016           The Generous Community                  

2017           How Does Descriptive Inquiry Help Us Move Between the Particular and Politics?  

2018             Just[ice] Relations: Knowing Self and Other

2019             Perceiving and Expressing Self, Other, and the World: Capacity, Vulnerability and Voice

2020             Forming and Reforming Identity in a Time of Rebellion Against Racial Injustice 

2021             Staying with Trouble: Provisioning for Meaningful Engagement In a Time of Crisis

2022             Description For Connection and Healing: How Do We (Re)Center Education on Our Human, Democratic Values?

2023       Practicing Description to Open Pathways for Creative Resistance

2024             Freedom Dreaming: Transforming Ourselves, Our Work, and Our World(s)

2025             Poetry As a Tool of Resistance: Envisioning Our Futures Together

Photos taken at Hampshire College by Stephane Barile (2022-2025).