About the Institute

Why this Institute? Why Now?

Friendship is a fascinating thing to study. Providing students with conceptual frameworks for understanding both literary characters’ and their own friendship identities can build students’ critical thinking, perspective-taking, and close reading skills while mitigating their sense of alienation and isolation within our schools and classrooms.

Few things are more important to teenagers than their friendships. Friendship is also a core feature of so much good fiction and film (Gatsby and Nick, Sula and Nel, Thelma and Louise; Chris and Gordie) and between writers (Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore; James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.) Yet friendship as a literary and cultural phenomenon is not often explicitly explored, studied, or understood within the high school English classroom. Since Covid, the challenge of forging, understanding, and maintaining friendships has taken on fresh urgency. And teens have had to adjust not just to the usual fluctuating conditions within their friendships, but in the world. Virtually and in real life, friendships are primary.

This two week residential institute aims to illuminate and deepen our functional and curricular understanding of this complex and universal social relationship. We will explore ways to bridge the lived experiences of our students (and ourselves) regarding friendship to those of great literary friendships and great thinkers. During the institute, teachers will study friendship as a literary, social, and cultural force–and a topic worthy of serving as an organizing principle within our courses.