2027 Spring Seminar Program

Visit TIP’s application page for instructions on how to apply.

The Teachers Institute of Philadelphia’s 15-week seminar program is open to non-charter teachers throughout the School District of Philadelphia. Led by professors in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and STEM fields, the seminars enable participants (called fellows) to write original curriculum units based on the material they have learned. Participation in TIP helps teachers build their content knowledge and improve results in the classroom. Fellows develop creative ways to teach material required by District, state and national curriculum standards. Seminars meet in-person Wednesdays and Thursdays, 5-7 pm, from January through May on the Penn or Temple campus. Upon successful completion of the program, fellows earn 30 Act 48 credits and a $1,500 stipend.

Writers on Writing
Christy Davids, Penn Creative Writing

Meets Wednesdays at Penn

What can we learn about writing from writers themselves? Forging ideas into essays, poems, articles, and stories that reflect our rich and varied lives is hard! We will investigate our pedagogies through process, theory, imagination, craft, and writing across the curriculum. In some cases, words have been weaponized against us, creating vexed relationships with writing and composition. By considering the act of writing as making a series of creative choices that reflect who we are and how we think about the world, we can reframe language as thrilling and empowering. Reading writers on writing will allow us to reframe how we use language, narrative, composition, and rhetoric so we can create expansive approaches to writing for our students and ourselves. Joan Didion wrote, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live”; if we consider the act of writing in this existential way, it’s possible to understand it as not only foundational, but revolutionary.

Asian American Food
Fariha I. Khan, Penn Asian American Studies

Meets Thursdays at Penn

You are what you eat. Growing food, eating, and sharing meals serve as intimate expressions of self and community. This course explores the history, traditions, and ethnic identity of food through a cultural lens. By examining how food is produced and consumed, we investigate the ways that immigrant communities navigate migration and food customs, religious dietary laws, and employment as they create lives in the United States. The course overviews the history of Asian American foodways and guest speakers from Philadelphia’s Asian American community will join class to offer personal experiences throughout the semester. The course methodology is based in the discipline of Folklore and Folklife and encourages an interactive relationship between a person and his/her surroundings.

Albums and Algorithms
Ben Torsney, Temple College of Education and Human Development

Meets Thursdays at Temple

This course uses music as a gateway into statistics, data analysis, and quantitative thinking. Students explore questions about lyrics, beats, music history, artist earnings, streaming, record sales, and the broader music industry while learning how data are collected, managed, analyzed, visualized, and communicated. Through hands-on labs and a semester-long campus problem project, students develop research questions, build surveys, collect and clean data, run basic analyses such as descriptive statistics, correlations, t-tests, and ANOVA, and present findings in written and visual form. The course emphasizes statistics as creative, practical, and connected to everyday life.

Murals as Classrooms, Classroom Murals
Shira Walinsky, Mural Arts Program, Weitzman School of Design, Penn

Meets Thursdays at Penn

Philadelphia has been called the mural capital of the world. This is largely due to the work of the Mural Arts Program (MAP), which was started as the Anti-Graffiti Network by Jane Golden. Golden directed the creative talents of young graffiti writers who had been arrested toward murals. She built MAP into a comprehensive program that encompassed art education, restorative justice, and a community-driven approach to art making. This seminar will be taught by a MAP artist who has worked on more than 40 murals. It will use the city as a classroom, showing how murals reflect the histories and people of their neighborhoods. The seminar will give an overview of muralism from the Mexican Muralists to the present. It will show the mural making process, from community meetings to dialogue to design. And it will ask participants to conceive their own mural as a classroom project, including the budget, materials and content.