Workshops: Where do you want to go together?
What do you and your team want to achieve?
Dynamic, creative learning experiences
Do you seek methods to effectively navigate Language and Literature's changing curricula?
Are you looking for ways to stay motivated and creative to reach all your students?
My workshops are always a unique experience. I do not recycle a cookie cutter presentation. Instead, we work together both before and during the experience to create something together. There are some ideas, strategies and texts that I bring with me of course — areas I have developed over the years and perhaps even published in writing or delivered in other workshops; most of my ideas I have tried with students or even created with them. I will try to best reach the participants as individuals with particular strengths and areas of growth.
We work with where you are and where you want to go, including follow-through plans. We will move and interact — this will not be a static presentation! Below you will find a sample of workshops, but they can be adapted and others can be requested. Many of the suggested workshops are also readily transferrable to TOK or Film Studies. Additionally, we can include another subject area or full secondary school on areas like: IDU (interdisciplinary units), Language across the Curriculum, Mind-Body Connection (and pedagogy or writing, specifically), Concept Based Learning, Case Studies, and TOK connections. I can also work with university students or professors, especially those in teacher training programs. Any workshop can be conducted en français as well or you can bring a translator for other languages.
Contact me for more information and to discuss our ideas together. Destination workshops will be advertised through the blog, my mailing list, Twitter, and Instagram. Feel free to read several of my testimonials.
Sample Workshops
Unit Creation: space of play
Sample guiding questions:
- How do you want to organise your units and for what purpose?
- What does the conceptual focus have to do with unit planning?
- How can we include texts for differentiation and extension in our unit planning?
We take a unit that you would like to develop and play around with it to go deeper with the ideas, bring together more texts and help you access more learning styles in your classroom. It will help you to engage with a brainstorming process and activity scope to bring Concept Based Learning, Inquiry, Differentiation, Creativity, Global Issues, Extension, multiple text types and multiple cultures and multilingualism together in a way that is both free and structured.
The unit can be one suggested in my book or blog or it may be something that your school has in mind.
City as Text
Sample guiding questions:
- What do cities tell us about texts and vice versa?
- How can we read the city as a text?
- How do written texts and the cinematic tell different stories of a city?
Especially from the dawn of Modernity, writers and artists have been interested in the concept of the city. This workshop investigates different texts that make use of the city and the way the city can be a text itself. We draw on ideas from: the uncanny, the cinematic, the ghostly, Modernity, urbanity, urban culture, globalisation, and space’s relationship with personal and cultural identity. We look at ways you can use this concept in your classroom in analysis, creative writing, text discovery, and experiential learning.
Making it Real: Global Issues & Case Studies
Sample guiding questions:
- What does academic research students conduct for the EE have to do with the real world?
- How can the UN Sustainable Development Goals guide the learning in our classroom?
- How can embodying a perspective help us understand a global issue or current event?
Students in IB DP Language A classes are now asked to directly engage with Global Issues. This focus on purpose in language and literature should be nothing new, but the formalisation demonstrates a renewed acknowledgment that the texts we study and writing we do with our students matter. In this workshop, we investigate ways to help students understand this purpose beyond the classroom and what it may have to do with CAS (Creativity, Activity, Service), the EE (Extended Essay), and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Additionally in any subject, case studies are a fantastic way to bring skills and content together to form conceptual understandings of a topic from different perspectives.
Creativity in Constraint
Sample guiding questions:
- What is creative thinking and writing?
- How does the creative process work?
- How does an understanding of text types allow for creativity?
In this workshop, we work within this hypothesis: creativity needs structure. This means more than putting things in boxes; it means building creative ideas on those developed before. It means understanding something deeply in order to experiment with it. Think of jazz music: a professional will know their scales inside and out before improvising.
I started to think deeply about this concept after a Space and Flow workshop with Raphan Kebe. The ideas behind the movements we did transferred to a way to think about writing. We look at the mind-body connection, Zen koans, and graphic organisers to orient us in thought and begin discussion.
Critical Lenses
Sample guiding questions:
- How does critical theory help students to analyse texts?
- How can literary lenses motivate both you and your students to learn more?
- In what ways can critical theory be used for both creative and structured lesson and unit planning?
Critical theory helps us to view literature through lenses that illuminate hidden truths in the texts. In understanding these as tools for your students to use, you can make a big impact on student agency in their reading of texts. We can focus on activities to use with students from many lenses, select one to take through more in depth in relation to a unit, or together consider critical reading from theorists that can enhance our teaching and refresh our passions for our subject. You can use chapter 4 of my book as a starting point.
Mind-Body Literature
Sample guiding questions:
- How can the mind-body connection help students find their voices?
- What do our bodies have to do with our learning?
- Why and how do authors include the body in their texts?
This workshop explores movement and bodily senses in the classroom as well as the body’s place in texts. We explore these connections in relation to student writing, conceptual understandings of ourselves and the world, and personal awareness and agency in our learning.
The workshop draws heavily on the teachings of yoga as a practice of mindfulness. Together, we can decide on the amount of movement you would like to include in the workshop.
Film & Philosophy workshop with the Comparative Literature Society at The University of Hong Kong
Additional Possibilities:
Evolution of journalism
Toward a Minor Literature
adaptation
Cultural Creation
Designing with Students
Multilingualism and Multiculturalism
Local and Global Texts
East/West Deconstructed
Space/Identity
Music and Literature
The Truth Workshop
Flow Workshop
TOK Connections
Teachers are Learners, Too!
Finding a Voice
& More...
CBL workshop for secondary teachers in Hong Kong
© Copyright Conceptual Literature by Kathleen Clare Waller
All images on this site are taken by Kathleen unless otherwise referenced.