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Bard Academy and Bard College at Simon’s Rock Announce Relocation to Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley

The Bard College Board of Trustees and the Bard College at Simon’s Rock Board of Overseers today jointly announced that Simon’s Rock will be relocating from its Great Barrington, MA, campus to a new campus on the property of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY. The school’s new home, recently acquired and adjacent to Bard’s existing campus, will open its doors to Simon’s Rock students in Fall 2025.
 
Founded in 1966, Simon’s Rock allows students to begin college after 10th or 11th grade; the Academy was launched in 2015 to prepare 9th and 10th grade students to enter the Early College program. The move will provide the Academy and Early College students with the same rigorous educational programs, creative opportunities, and tight-knit campus community they currently enjoy, while also giving them access to Bard’s existing facilities and programs.

Current students will remain at the Great Barrington campus through the end of the next semester, Spring ’25, and those opting to continue their program of study and degree completion at Simon’s Rock and Bard can do so in the new location next fall.

“Simon’s Rock has been the pioneer of early college, and as a result of its success and track record, there are now 10 public early college high school campuses founded by Bard in six states and more than 1 million high school students nationwide taking early college courses this year,” said Bard College President Leon Botstein. “Because of that success, and the larger national movement which it inspired, demand for the original residential model is less strong than it was when Elizabeth Blodgett Hall founded Simon’s Rock in the 1960s. With Bard’s recent purchase of the Massena Campus, we now have more flexibility in space that can allow for a more financially viable and educationally rich future for Simon’s Rock by placing it physically proximate to the institution that has owned and run it for 45 years.”
 
Botstein added: “By moving the institution, we are giving Simon’s Rock the opportunity to continue its mission. We’re grateful to the community of Great Barrington in the Berkshires for being home to Simon’s Rock’s founding and a good neighbor for its nearly 60 years there. I’m pleased that this move has the backing of the Simon’s Rock Board of Overseers and our leading donors—all of whom are either alumni or parents of alumni.”

Along with amenities and programming that will be available to them on the Massena Campus, Simon’s Rock students will have access to the educational and cultural resources on the main Annandale campus. This includes the Reem-Kayden Center for Science and Computation, the Frank Gehry-designed Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, the Stevenson Library, the Hessel Museum of Art, and more. Simon’s Rock students will also be able to participate in Bard events, clubs, musical groups, and sports teams.

“We are now at a pivotal moment for Simon’s Rock,” said John B. Weinstein, Provost and Vice President at Bard College at Simon’s Rock. “Departing from our beloved Great Barrington campus is heartbreaking—the campus has been my professional home for more than 20 years and my literal home for nearly five. It is full of memories for so many people. But this move is the only course of action for the school to preserve the viability of a residential early college experience in an unpredictable time for institutions of higher education nationwide.”

Simon’s Rock will continue to secure and maintain the Great Barrington campus following the relocation and will work with local officials during the search for a suitable new owner for the property. Bard and Simon’s Rock will also work with New York officials in the village of Red Hook to ensure the timely renovation of Massena Campus facilities and a smooth transition for faculty, staff, and students to their new home.

“This is a bittersweet moment for all of us who know and deeply love Simon’s Rock and were privileged to become members of the amazing community fostered at the school,” said James M. Clark Jr. ’76, Chair of the Bard College at Simon’s Rock Board of Overseers. “Yet rest assured that along with the physical relocation of the school comes a transfer of the spirit and ethos that has guided Simon’s Rock since its founding. We are excited for this new chapter in the school’s history.”

“I have loved and supported Simon’s Rock for many years because I have remained confident that we offer an outstanding education for young people,” said Emily H. Fisher, Bard College at Simon’s Rock Chair Emerita, and parent of a Simon’s Rock graduate. “I truly believe that the new Massena campus is the beginning of a brighter, more secure future for Simon’s Rock.”

Students will be given individual consultation on the move and what it means for their course of study. For students who do not wish to relocate to the Massena Campus, Simon’s Rock is working with partner institutions in Massachusetts for transfer pathways.

For more information on the relocation and the future of the Great Barrington site, please visit simons-rock.edu/announcement.

Post Date: 11-19-2024

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Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking and Master of Arts in Teaching Program Receive Library of Congress Grant Award

The Bard College Institute for Writing and Thinking (IWT) and Bard College Master of Arts in Teaching Program (MAT) have been awarded their fourth grant to imbed digitized Library of Congress primary sources into their programming for teachers and students. Bard MAT and IWT are known for their innovative strategies in supporting literacy instruction across disciplines through writing-based, student-centered teaching practices. The latest grant of $74,911, awarded under the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program, supports their collaborative one-year project “Mapping Boundaries: Writing to Read Primary Sources in Middle School Classrooms.”

The Bard MAT/IWT project will make use of the vast archival resources of the Library of Congress in professional development workshops that model how to apply writing-to-read and writing-to-learn strategies to primary sources in ELA, Social Studies, and STEM classrooms. The project will develop a workshop series for teachers, teachers-in-training, and middle school and high school students, focused on an interdisciplinary collection of sources (historical surveys, maps, and representations of the American landscape). The primary goal of the workshops is to offer writing-based strategies to help students delve into texts that might feel daunting and inaccessible and to give them tools to slow down their reading and uncover surprising connections and meaning.
 
Proposed workshops include one-day events during the school year, programming in the MAT summer semester, and an intensive weeklong workshop that will be offered within IWT’s popular and long-running July Weeklong Workshop series. Some workshops will be held in person on Bard College’s campus in New York’s Hudson Valley; some will be held online.

The focus of the project is to revise and expand their current program of Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS)–centered training workshops and pre-service education courses and more fully circulate the materials created in these workshops for educators. IWT’s current Library of Congress–focused workshops will be revised specifically for middle school classrooms, with skills-building exercises in reading and writing critically, and the resources made widely available to middle school educators. Modeling classroom activities that stimulate middle school students’ engagement with language, ideas, and archival sources, these workshops will be held on the Bard campus, online, and in middle schools partnered with Bard MAT. Bard will use its established networks, promotional forums, and targeted advertising to attract middle school teachers as workshop participants. Newly-developed middle school lesson plans and primary source sets will be posted on a new section of the IWT website, as will videos from sixth through ninth grade teachers demonstrating writing-based teaching with primary sources inspired by the Bard workshops they’ve attended. In required laboratory classes, MAT will train education degree candidates in archival literacy instruction for middle school ELA and Social Studies classes. MAT history students will revise the chapter of a textbook, supplemented by a curated set of primary sources and archival materials. These primary source sets will be integral to Capstone Projects by MAT degree candidates, and archived in the Bard Library Digital Commons as searchable Open Educational Resources and cross-posted to the TPS Consortium Created Materials site: https://tpsconsortiumcreatedmaterials.org/
 
To inform this work, participants will draw on Library of Congress sources such as historical city maps, stereopticon photographs of Lower East Side street vendors, abolitionist posters, and 1920s Edison films. Sources might include Army Corps of Engineers maps and surveys of the Mississippi River flood plains, Native American paintings, and photographs of 19th-century utopian communities, for example. Reading primary sources poses particular literacy challenges for students—whether because of challenging language, unfamiliar visual conventions, or simply because (unlike many texts that students encounter in the classroom) primary sources were not written or produced with 21st-century students as their intended audiences. The writing-to-learn and writing-to-read strategies, modeled in the IWT and MAT workshops, help teachers guide students through encounters with challenging texts. Writing-to-learn and writing-to-read strategies are particularly empowering when students use them to navigate and decipher historical and primary sources, helping them to find unexpected layers of meaning and interpret unfamiliar data.

Bard College IWT/MAT have previously been awarded three TPS Regional grants in 2019, 2020, and 2021 for the projects “The World of the Poem: Teaching Poetry through Primary Sources,” “‘If Woman Upset the World’: Reading and Writing Women Activists of the Hudson Valley,” and the four-year “Mapping Unknowns: Writing to Read Primary Sources.” These successful projects operated through the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Regional Grant Program.

Post Date: 11-18-2024

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Krista Caballero Receives Tufts University Traveling Fellows Grant

Krista Caballero, codirector of the Center for Experimental Humanities and artist in residence at Bard, has been announced as a recipient of a 2024 Traveling Fellows grant for $10,000 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts University. The SMFA Fellowship program, which has been in place since 1899, supports fellows to journey to places around the world to conduct research and find inspiration for their artistic endeavors. Caballero will travel to Colombia, home to the greatest number of bird species in the world, to create work focused on the ecological and cultural implications of bird species decline for her project “Birding the Future,” an ongoing collaborative work with Frank Ekeberg that explores current extinction rates by specifically focusing on the warning abilities of birds as bioindicators of environmental change.

Post Date: 11-15-2024