As the days get longer and warmer, we're gearing up for the 2026 BLTN summer programming. We're thrilled to have BLSE faculty member Sam Swope as our 2026 BLTN Faculty Fellow. Sam is President Emeritus of the Academy for Teachers, which he founded in NYC, and he has published several books over the decades. Sam is teaching Short Form Writing: Teaching and Beyond on the Vermont campus this summer. 

This summer we'll also welcome Dr. Cynthia Ballenger back to our BLTN conversations. (She led a highly engaging session on teacher inquiry during a virtual visit last summer, which led to a year-long inquiry group featuring several BLTN teachers.) Cindy will join the July 7 BLTN meeting in person this year, where she will share some of the insights from her recent book, Teaching Is Inquiry. 

Youth filmmakers from the BLTN What's the Story? program will showcase their films on July 10 and BLTN's Mary Guerrero (MA '04) will team up with former BLTN Associate Director, Dr. Ceci Lewis (MA '99), for a July 24 workshop engaging participants in archival work featuring the late professor Michael Armstrong's scholarship on children's artistic expression. 

While the ink is still drying on the 2026-27 fellows' roster, we plan to welcome approximately 40 fellows to the three campuses and online. At least seven of our fellows will be new to BLTN. Look for profiles of the fellows in our "Meet the Fellows" section of next month's BLTN Journal. 

This month's resource is provided by Liz Farrow (MA '21), of Oak Park and River Forest High School, Oak Park, IL. Contact Kurt Ostrow if you have a unit or teaching idea you'd like to share in a future issue.

At my school, the capstone junior year research paper is elusively called "The Junior Theme" and its reputation precedes it. Rising underclassmen arrive at their penultimate English class with a nightmare in mind: the longest paper they've ever had to write, nitpicky citation rules, weeks of late-night homework. And now more than ever, they bring a curiosity about what AI can do to help. In curriculum meetings, our educator brains are twisted by the conundrum of AI. ChatGPT and Claude can definitely create the "Junior Theme" final product, so how do we adapt the assignment to help students stay in the messiness of authentic inquiry, to value the process, and to create something that has their own unique stamp on it?

This year, inspired by our journalism teacher, I required students to select a topic that had tethers to our local community. I required them to conduct an in-person interview and to document an in-person observation in an impacted community space. Unsurprisingly, many students were scared to get out there, off their screens, and into conversation. So we practiced interviewing each other, we took a class trip to practice "observing" and compared our notes. Students' topics became more personal, and with permission to use first person to discuss their active boots-on-the-ground role in the research, individual student voices really shone through their drafted work.  

One student set out to argue that we ought to fight invasive species at our local Thatcher Woods, but after his interview with a restoration ecologist, he came back to class both giddy with pride at having conducted the interview and a bit nervous about the fact that the conversation was going to require him to completely shift his research focus. He learned that conservation efforts at Thatcher reflected exactly what he had planned to "ask for." He used this new understanding to argue that Thatcher Woods could in fact be used as a model for other more endangered areas.  This authentic research pivot was facilitated by the person-to-person element of the research process and absolutely could not be duplicated with a prompt on ChatGPT.  Many students reported similar experiences. I weighed these research "experiences" as heavily as the final paper product to honor the authenticity of the process. It wasn't without its growing pains. It's hard to shift instruction and rewrite assignments that have historically been successful, but for this change, it was worth it.  

In the spirit of BLTN co-founder, Dixie Goswami, BLTN honors and supports the work of current and former fellows through action grants. Application for grants of up to $4,000 for the 2026-27 school year will be open from May 1 until July 5. Goswami Action Grants are intended to support BLTN-related classroom programs, projects, events, and travel. Look for an email announcement May 1 or contact bltn@middlebury.edu. 

BLTN NextGen's Youth Advisory Board will engage students in a writing and information session during the school day on Thursday, April 16, 2026 (10-11am Eastern). Their goal is to introduce peers across BLTN to the work they do, including regular celebratory writing through prompts and sharing.

Contact Tom McKenna ASAP if you're interested in joining with a class, or if you have questions.

As many of you know, BLTN lost a revered friend and colleague in Rex Lee Jim on February 24, 2026. (Diné College announcement). In addition to his scholarship at Bread Loaf, and his many accomplishments as a statesman, educator, poet, playwright, and healer, Rex initiated the BLTN Navajo-Kentuckian collaboration (with Brent Peters, MA '16), and he helped to found the Navajo site of BLTN NextGen (with Dr. Ceci Lewis, MA '99). 

Do you have a Rex story or a special memory or photo? We invite you to contribute to a special section of the upcoming BLTN Journal dedicated to Rex's memory. Please send vignettes, photos, and/or videos to Tom McKenna at tpmckenn@middlebury.edu before April 30.  Ahéheeʼ

BLTN teams from two high schools in Louisville, and from one school in San Francisco traveled to the Middlebury Institute of International Studies campus in Monterey, California last month, to participate in the annual international meeting of high schoolers, the Critical Issues Forum. This year's theme was 'Facing the Global Nuclear Threat: Empowering Youth for Global Security.' 

Both Louisville teams are part of Louisville's BLTN's NextGen Leadership Network sites. Nora Bartlett's (MA '11) students from Atherton High School presented "Nuclear-Themed Films and Media as a Means for Inspiring Youth Engagement." Susannah Kilbourne's (MA '11) Fern Creek High School  students presented "Project Exigence: The Barriers Between Youth and Authority in the Nonproliferation Movement."  Allison Holsten (MA '04) brought a team of two participant-observers from the International School of San Francisco.

"As global challenges continue to evolve," reflects organizer, Masako Toki in her conference report, "the importance of youth engagement in issues of nuclear risk and disarmament has never been greater. The Critical Issues Forum remains committed to providing a platform where students can explore these issues, connect with peers from around the world, and develop the knowledge and confidence to contribute meaningfully to global conversations. The 2026 conference once again demonstrated that education, dialogue, and empathy are essential foundations for long-term peace and security." 

BLTN participants at the 2026 Critical Issues Forum 

This is the final BLTN newsletter of the 2025-26 academic year. Thanks for reading along with us. Look for the 2026 edition of the BLTN Journal in May.

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