Project Co-Directors: Emily Style, M.A., Brenda Flyswithhawks, Ph.D., Emmy Howe, M.Ed.

Senior Associate for the SEED Expansion: Peggy McIntosh, Ph.D.,

"Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed... and I am prepared to expect wonders."
— Henry David Thoreau

The National SEED Project on Inclusive Curriculum, a staff-development equity project for educators, is in its twenty-sixth year of establishing teacher-led faculty development seminars in public and private schools throughout the U.S. and in English-speaking international schools. A week-long SEED summer New Leaders' Workshop prepares school teachers to hold year-long reading groups with other teachers to discuss making school climates and curricula more gender-fair and multiculturally equitable. A Minnesota SEED anthology, published in October 1998 and available from the SEED office at Wellesley, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , offers a buoyant glimpse of teachers' experiences in the SEED Project and the project's effect on their classroom teaching.

In year-long, monthly seminars, the SEED Project enables adults to examine contemporary scholarship as well as "the textbooks of our lives" in order to inform community conversation about schooling and culture. Educators connected to the SEED network testify that as a result of their SEED affiliation, they listen to all voices, including their own, with widened attention. SEED seminar participants handle with more confidence and competence the challenges and joys of the many kinds of diversity found in their own lives and in the lives of others. SEED helps to create multiculturally equitable and gender balanced curriculum that makes room for reflecting upon the lives of all girls and boys (and women and men) with a sense of integrity and coherence.

National SEED Project Co-Directors are Dr. Brenda Flyswithhawks, Instructor in Psychology at Santa Rosa Junior College in California; Emmy Howe, a founder of the Welcoming Schools Initiative and Open View Farm in Conway, MA; and Emily Style, an English teacher who has taught in urban and suburban New Jersey public and private schools and has done adjunct teaching for Cornell and NYU. Dr. Peggy McIntosh is Senior Associate for the W. K. Kellogg Foundation SEED Expansion, 2011-14. Howe and McIntosh are based at the Wellesley Centers for Women.

They are joined each summer at the New Leaders' Workshop by experienced SEED leaders from various disciplines and diverse ethnic backgrounds who help to staff the week-long training. The project provides various types of technical assistance throughout the year for SEED seminars, which have now been led by coordinators in over 30 U.S. states, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Singapore, Taipei, Tokyo, Toronto, Vancouver, and Dar Es Salaam. Once begun, many SEED seminars continue meeting for years.

2012 Workshops
The 2012 New Leaders' Workshops of the National SEED Project will be held July 12-19 and July 26-August 2 in San Anselmo, CA, and will enroll approximately 40 new SEED leaders, alone or in teams of two. Schools pay a $3,900 participation fee per new leader toward the cost of the summer training and year-long technical support. They also provide a $1,000 book budget for the school-based, voluntary seminar. SEED Seminars are led chiefly by teachers in K-12 classrooms. In some cases, parents, college teachers, and administrators have also led seminars.

Waiver of SEED fees:
Owing to a grant from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, public schools which serve the most vulnerable children and families are eligible to apply for a waiver of all SEED-connected fees and expenditures. Six public schools in either rural or urban areas will be funded during each of the next three years, 2012-2014. Waiver application forms available here.

Key questions for all participants in SEED seminars are:

1. What would curriculum and pedagogy look like if the diverse lives of women and girls were seen as co-central with the diverse lives of men and boys?
2. How can curriculum and teaching methods provide, in the metaphors of Emily Style, both windows into each others' experiences and mirrors of each student's own reality and validity?

2012 SEED training and application forms.

—> For more information, contact co-directors:

Brenda Flyswithhawks
Santa Rosa Junior College
1501 Mendocino Avenue
Santa Rosa, CA 95401
Tel: 707.527.4613
Fax: 707.522.2755

or

Emily Style
286 Meeker Street
So. Orange, NJ 07079
Tel: 973.763.6378
Fax 973.763.5670
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it  

or

Emmy Howe
Wellesley Centers for Women
Wellesley College
106 Central Street
Wellesley, MA 02481
Tel: 781.283.2512
Fax: 781.283.2504
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it