Organized by Gary Handwerk (English and Comparative Literature)

Ongoing for ten years this coming spring, this program brings University of Washington faculty and local high school teachers together each summer to co-design a literature class to be taught simultaneously at both levels. Students at both the UW and Eastlake, Lake Washington, and Roosevelt high schools will be reading and discussing Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner, and Wild Seed by Octavia Butler.

The co-planned curriculum facilitates exchanges between faculty and teachers about interpretative and pedagogical approaches. It also provides a structure that allows exchange between undergraduate and high school students. As part of the program, high school students join class discussions at the university while undergraduates go to the high schools to experience how the texts are engaged in other contexts. The exchanges among educators and students at different schools provide intense intellectual stimulation. They also reveal how readings are shaped through different personal, social, and institutional frames.

Texts and Teachers represents one of many efforts to strengthen K-12 teaching through collaborations among university and high-school educators. In this context, courses like the one Handwerk will be teaching on literature and the environment create bridges between university-based, interdisciplinary inquiry and the new forms of integrated curriculum developed at area high schools.

The Simpson Center supports Texts and Teachers by underwriting summer stipends for participating teachers. Faculty who are interested in participating in the program are encouraged to contact Gary Handwerk.

Karen Mattson, English teacher at Eastlake High School, Redmond