July 27-29
Opening talk
Reading, Writing, and Thinking the Hudson Valley
FDR Home & Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY

Register and pay by check. (Until July 15 fee is $90 for all three days or $35 per day.)
Register and pay by credit card.
Register with My Learning Plan to receive a certificate from Mid-Hudson Teacher Center.

We are thrilled to have David Sobel as our opening speaker. David co-directs the Center for Place-based Education and is Director of Teacher Certification Programs at the Antioch New England Graduate School.

A pioneer of place-based education, David has written several books including Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms & Communities and Mapmaking with Children: Sense of Place Education for the Elementary Years.

His talk, Place-based Education:  Making School more like a Farmer's Market, will prepare us to think about making better use of the ideas and resources to be presented throughout the institute.

Here's a sneak preview . . .

The landscape of schooling has begun to look like the sprawl of America. Generic textbooks designed for the big markets of California and Texas provide the same homogenized, unhealthy diet as all those fast food places on the strip. Educational biodiversity falls prey to the bulldozers of standardization. What is nearby has become parochial and insignificant.

Teaching reading, writing, and thinking doesn’t have to be limited by textbooks that crowd out real-life experience and disregard the vast resources to be found within a 50-mile radius.

Place-based education is a response to the alienation of schools from community, and the decoupling of schools from historic sites, local landscapes, and farms. Instead, we need schools organized around the principles of the farmers' market, drawing on the resources and variety of the local community. 

Let's bring education back into the neighborhood. Let's use local museums, parks, historic sites, archives, farms, and galleries to teach reading, writing, and thinking. Let's connect students with adult mentors who can show them the value of these skills in daily life. Let's get the town engineers, farmers, museum curators, mayors, historic site interpreters, and environmental educators onto the schoolyard and inside the four walls of the schools.