Andover Bread Loaf Helps Students and Teachers Worldwide Find Their Voice

For 22 years, ABL has helped improve the writing skills of teachers and students from urban areas

July 13, 2009 — “It’s not wrong to think in this game, but it certainly isn’t helpful,” instructs a workshop leader to a circle of 20 teachers who have traveled to Phillips Academy this summer from cities as far-flung as New Orleans, Mumbai, Vancouver, and Nairobi.  The game is “word ball” and for the next five-minutes adults verbally volley random words back and forth to each other with the fervent speed of hot potato.

Upstairs, in the Steinbach theatre, more than 70 children from grades six to nine from Lawrence, Mass., sit in a large circle individually brainstorming what their “inner voice” would look like if it were a person. Photographs of each child cover the walls of the theatre paired with poems titled “I am.”  A picture of a smiling boy is paired with the poem “I Am Mike”:

    I am the one who tends to his own because the family has enough issues
    I am the one who will step up when no one else will
    I am the one who clumsily breaks stuff then clumsily apologizes
    I am the one who doesn’t take anything too seriously
    I am the one who gets laughs
 
These two writing workshops comprise one of Phillips Academy’s most popular outreach programs:  Andover Bread Loaf, or ABL. In collaboration with the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College's graduate school, ABL offers an intensive professional development workshop each summer to teachers from urban areas around the world.  In addition to the teacher workshop, ABL also offers a writing workshop to public school students from the neighboring city of Lawrence.
 
Although the student group and the teacher group get together only a few times, the teachers benefit from the interaction, particularly when they stand before the students and read out loud from their workshop writing at the end of the three-week program.

“The teachers feel vulnerable. Some are terrified!” laughs Betsy Kimball, an ESL teacher from the Arlington Elementary School in Lawrence who completed the teacher workshop herself and now helps run the student one. “It’s when the light goes on and teachers begin to really value students’ perspectives.”

Which is the point, according to ABL founder and director, Lou Bernieri, who is also an English instructor at Phillips Academy. “The student workshop becomes a model for the teachers, a place where they can start to view students as equals in the learning process.  And time and again we see students leave the program more confident because their voices have been heard.  We want them to take that new found confidence back to their classrooms.”

Noelia Bare, an executive at Liberty Mutual in Boston, credits ABL’s student workshops for not only improving her writing, but giving her a sense of community growing up.  “I did the ABL each summer after sixth, seventh, and eight grade.  In ninth grade, I became an ABL leader,” says Bare.  “Unlike other programs, kids aren’t admitted to the program based on grades, but on their willingness to really try hard. Everyone is on a level playing field where it’s safe to express yourself.  You feel like you are home.”

In addition to its summer session, ABL conducts programs throughout the year with teachers and students, most recently in Nairobi where, this past April 15, ABL graduates conducted a similar program with local students and teachers. At the end of July, a group of ABL participants will work with students and teachers in New Orleans as well.

“Our motto is ‘fostering writing around the world,’” says Bernieri.  “We want to give everyone, students and teachers, the confidence to write.  But what we really want is to help them be a part of a larger community committed to passing on what they learned here to their students and peers.”