In celebration of #GivingTuesday, we’re excited to announce a strategic partnership with The Creative Core and renowned poet and Merwin Conservancy board member Naomi Shihab Nye that will allow us to pilot a new teaching fellowship program for Hawai‘i teachers in 2018.
This fellowship includes an intensive 5-day institute on Maui in June 2018, immersion in W.S. Merwin’s poetry and palm garden, year-round support from professional mentors, and opportunities to collaborate and stay connected to other fellows in their cohort year-round. This fellowship will be awarded to fifteen talented Hawaii teachers from public and private schools, who teach students between the age of 10 and 15, all expenses paid.
With a focus on fostering creativity and imagination in schools, this year-round program has the potential to have great effects that ripple into our communities, both statewide and nationwide.
With your support, participating teachers and their students will experience the following outcomes:
- Teachers feel a sense of restoration, revitalization and readiness as they return to their classrooms in Fall;
- Teachers will implement new lessons and social-emotional learning strategies in their respective classrooms, which will:
- Awaken, celebrate, and sustain creativity, imagination, and compassion for themselves and their students;
- Identify and assess the growth of creativity and imagination in themselves and their students
- Develop and refine curriculum and personal tools to stimulate and support creativity and imagination in themselves and their students
- Include W.S. Merwin’s story and the story of The Merwin Conservancy in their classroom curriculum;
Throughout the 2018-19 school year, teachers will share their pedagogical and creative writing, ask questions, develop lesson plans, and review student work with fellows and mentors. By the end of the 2018-19 school year, teachers will share their “shining star” lesson(s), reflections, student work samples, and personal writing on a new education space on the Conservancy’s website, expanding the program’s reach well beyond Hawai‘i.
We hope you’ll join our #GivingTuesday campaign today, and help us make a direct impact in your community.
To learn more about the program, visit the Merwin Creative Teaching Fellowship page.
For updates about this program, please sign up for our Fellowship mailing list.
Featured photos by Morgan Jones used with permission.