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Our unique Summer Institute is an intensive course for passionate and curious teachers and high school students to come together in creative collaboration as “players” to perform responses to literature through writing, reading, image, and sound. Our process guides our mixed-age team to develop compelling original content and hone their voices as performers through the co-creation of a multimedia production inspired by a shared text. With the help of guest teaching artists, the players step into the text at hand through improvisational sound and movement, experimental layering of mode and medium, the interplay between physical and digital space, and the remixing of text on text.
This year, the program will bring together 12 high school students and 12 teachers to create an original multimodal performance piece inspired by a reading of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Why The Jungle?
Originally published in 1905 as a serial and then again in 1906 as a book, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle became an immediate sensation throughout the world. The novel traces the story of Jurgis Rudkis, a recent immigrant who travels from Lituania with his family and friends to establish a life in Chicago’s Packingtown, an area known for its crowded tenements and proximity to the stockyards and slaughterhouses of the meatpacking industry. Jurgis enters this industry only to uncover its horrors--often brutal, inhumane expectations for workers and dangerous, unsanitary conditions. The Jungle quickly emerged as an instrument of political reform, catalyzing the institution of new food safety laws. But as Sinclair famously lamented, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." Critics since have declared it “not a great novel,” yet it endures on secondary syllabi around the country. Why? What precisely did Sinclair expose? How does this novel speak to the culture of Packingtown, of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century? How, if at all, does this novel continue to have resonance for us today? These are the kinds of questions we’ll set out to address together.
See last year's institute in action:
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Who: Teachers and high school students (9th-12th graders)
Where: Teachers College, Columbia University When: July 16-28, 2018 (Please note that while the majority of program is teachers and students in collaboration, there are slight differences in the schedules.)
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