institute 2009
Institute Highlights
Download Tentative Detailed Institute Schedule (PDF, 29 KB)
Week One
Performance of “The Chrysanthemums,”
a Performance Workshop
With Matthew Spangler & Elizabeth Lee Barber
Sunday evening banquet and performance
This presentation will feature a chamber theatre performance of John Steinbeck’s short story, “The Chrysanthemums,” followed by audience discussion with the actors and director/script writer.
Steinbeck as Short Story Writer
With Chris Fink
Monday
Participants will explore the importance of short stories in The Long Valley to Steinbeck’s career as a writer. An interactive lecture will take a writer’s perspective, focusing on techniques Steinbeck first learned while practicing the short story form. Participants will also consider how Steinbeck benefited from the broad and profitable American short story writer’s publishing market in the 1930’s.
Steinbeck and Place
With Susan Shillinglaw
Tuesday
This presentation will give an overview of Steinbeck’s California—biographical, historical, cultural, environmental--with particular attention to the importance of place and to Steinbeck’s ecological sensibilities. The first week of this Institute focuses on Steinbeck’s “valley fiction,” the short stories in The Long Valley, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden.
Tour of Salinas and the Salinas Valley
With Susan Shillinglaw
Wednesday
The group will tour Steinbeck’s “Valley of the World,” the Salinas Valley where he was born and grew up. Highlights are lunch at the Steinbeck house in Salinas, a tour of the National Steinbeck Center, a visit to the Red Pony Ranch, and a drive through Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven.
The Grapes of Wrath: Steinbeck and his Journals
With Robert DeMott
Thursday
Participants will focus on the historical and personal/authorial background of The Grapes of Wrath. Through group discussion, participants will consider the relationship between sections of Grapes and Steinbeck’s self-commentary in Working Days.
Eliciting Classroom Voices:
A Dialogic Steinbeck Curriculum
With Mary Adler
Thursday
Participants will reconsider approaches to teaching Steinbeck through theory and research on dialogic interactions. If dialogic classrooms produce higher student achievement and learning (and they do), how do we get there? Whose voices are silent—and how do we cultivate them? What role is there for teacher knowledge and expertise? We’ll begin with a short lecture defining terms and highlighting the role of discourse in learning, and then move into small groups to explore ways in which Steinbeck’s work is particularly suited to cultivating dialogic interactions and extending them over time.
Steinbeck and the Legacy of Working People’s Literature in California
With Persis Karim
Friday
This presentation/workshop highlights some of the literature by California writers that represents the experiences and sentiments of working people in this state. Examples of poetry, fiction and nonfiction (including journalist accounts) by authors such as Steinbeck, Louis Owens, Tillie Olsen, Carlos Bulosan, Alexander Saxton and Helena Viramontes, offer a perspective on a class of writers, that effectively produces a culture, a literature, of the working class. By looking at this writing in both its larger American, and more specifically Californian historical contexts, we see how these writers have helped shape an awareness of working people, and have also contributed to American literature as a whole.
River Road, Wine Tasting, Missions, and Big Sur
Saturday
Field trip to King City, San Antonio mission--wine tasting along the Monterey Wine trail. Steinbeck’s maternal grandparents, the Hamiltons, were residents of King City, living on a stone dry ranch outside the town. After driving down the “River road,” and enjoying wine tasting at regional wineries, we will visit the environs of King City and the San Antonio mission, one of the most pristine of the California missions, site of William Randolph Hearst’s hunting lodge, and site of Steinbeck’s novel, To a God Unknown.
Week Two
Carmel/Monterey tour
With Susan Shillinglaw
Monday
Each of the three towns on the Monterey Peninsula, Spanish Monterey, conservative Pacific Grove (founded as a Methodist retreat in 1872) and arty Carmel (founded as a real estate vision of natural living in 1907), shaped Steinbeck’s political and social consciousness. We will visit Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House in Carmel and consider the impact of Jeffers’ works on Steinbeck; and we will visit Steinbeck’s Monterey homes, ending the tour at the intertidal in New Monterey.
Focus on the Monterey Peninsula/Tidepools
With Susan Shillinglaw
Tuesday
Steinbeck spent much of his childhood near the sea at his parents summer cottage in Pacific Grove. His “Monterey trilogy,” Tortilla Flat, Cannery Row, and Sweet Thursday, are all about communities living on the margins. We will be discussing the importance of the western “edge,” the seacoast, and how Steinbeck’s relationship with Edward Flanders Ricketts, marine biologist, shaped his environmental vision.
Cannery Row, a Setting, a Place, a Habitat,
a Community
With Nancy Harray
Tuesday
Following a short discussion of why our math-science academy selected Cannery Row as a core work to bring together freshman English, biology, and social studies, we will read together two articles useful in English and social studies classes for introducing the first writing assignment.
Participants will complete the first part of an activity useful with students, as they discover each person’s “sacred places.” The workshop will close with a discussion of other activities that enrich the reading and discussion of Cannery Row, including an assignment students can complete if they visit the Row.
Developing Ocean Literacy: Observing in the Intertidal
With Craig Strang and William Gilly
Wednesday
Participants will be introduced to techniques of tidepool observation and put those skills to use alongside two biologists during an early morning venture into the intertidal. Later, Dr. Strang will talk with the group about the role of science, natural history, and the ocean in literature classes, and introduce participants to the Ocean Literacy program.
Resistance to Steinbeck’s Vision: Issues of Censorship in the Classroom
With Debora Stonich
Thursday
Participants will explore strategies for introducing highly controversial Steinbeck pieces like Of Mice and Men and Grapes of Wrath. Topics such as “How to Survive a Book Challenge,” and “What to say, and What not to Say” when parents ask, “Why are you exposing my children to this filth?” will be discussed. Additionally, participants will receive proven lesson plans that ensure that students will have the ability to develop and deepen their own unique writing voice through the study of Steinbeck’s writing styles.
Teaching Steinbeck in Innovative Contexts
With Mary Adler
Thursday
This session will offer a framework for thinking about the possibilities that integration can offer—both across disciplines and with technology. After examining several examples, participants will consider curricula possibilities at their sites as well as potential benefits and tradeoffs that may result.