The Greenville News
Saturday, February 9, 2002

Carnegie Corp. Fellowships Offer Training Opportunities

By Lynne Lucas, Staff Writer (llucas@greenillenews.com)

Mauldin -- An innovative way of learning in secondary schools -- that connects English students electronically with their peers around the country to discuss language arts and literature studies -- is gaining ground in middle and high school classrooms around Greenville County.

Fellowships from the Carnegie Corp. have been granted to 10 more Greenville County English teachers to attend the Bread Loaf School of English, a prestigious graduate school of Middlebury College, where this summer they will take English courses and receive telecommunications training.

Following the training, these teachers then are able to carry out cross-classroom study exchanges, using special software, with other BreadNet classrooms in the nation.

At Mauldin High School Friday, educators gathered for a leadership conference about Bread Loaf in the Cities to discuss their goals, share victories, listen to BreadNet students and inspire more teachers to join the growing network of teachers involved in the program. "We're trying to build a strong force here," said Janet Atkins, coordinator for Bread Loaf in the Cities project for the school district and an eighth-grade teacher at Northwest Middle School. "With recruitment this year, we should have close to maybe 40 teachers."

Gail Denton, an eighth-grade language arts teacher at Riverside Middle who was a fellow at Bread Loaf two summers ago, said her students were studying the Holocaust period and an account by survivor/author Elie Wiesel with Navajo students in Arizona.

"When you think about the community of learners we have, studying that piece of literature and the diversity within that community, it's just phenomenal," said Denton. "I can't recreate that in my own classroom." Such unconventional methods of learning are needed to best prepare students for a rapidly moving global society, said James Lytle, superintendent of Trenton Public Schools, who was the keynote speaker at the two-day conference. Changes in patterned thinking are essential to make public schools more effective, he said.

"Significant change cannot be done in a linear way," he told teachers and administrators.

He offered to teachers seven constructs for change to contemplate. They included building deep values and core competencies, increasing diversity and connectivity and altering presumed boundaries for teaching. The BreadNet collaborative model embraces all of those concepts, said program advocates. As part of the Bread Loaf in the Cities program, last year Greenville was chosen as one of four school districts nationally to participate in a three-year, $1.2 million grant from the Carnegie Corp. Mauldin High School was chosen as the flagship school to help disperse the program through Greenville County schools.

About 2,000 students in South Carolina are engaged in Bread Loaf Teacher Network activities .