TALC/Teacher Shelter, 1969-81: What Difference Has It Made?.

This is the second appearance of the Teachers’ Active Learning Center (TALC)/Teacher Shelter in English Education. When we first appeared in 1975, the teachers’ center had recently moved from San Francisco across the Bay to the Oakland Unified School District. The center was initiated by project staff (former teachers) and teachers involved in an off-campus pre-service/ in-service teacher education project of San Francisco State University- STEP/TTT, focused on desegregating schools in Sausalito and San Francisco- and was open to any teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. A total of 400 teachers came during the first year from as far away as thirty miles for after school presentations in science or interdisciplinary curriculum or for evening workshops in mathematics. When we became semiindependent in 1972 through foundation grants (Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund), we expanded the program to include workshop courses in language arts and creative arts. Nearly 1,000 teachers participated at least once over the two years we were in the central city location. Then, in August 197 ‘4, the Teachers’ Center Advisory Group of Oakland teachers “hired” us (two staff members) to make their newborn center become a reality. To this end, we transported our books, plants, tools, materials, interdisciplinary program, active learning process, foundation funding, university fiscal tie, and teachers’ center concept across the Bay. The concept we brought (because it matched that of the Advisory Group) was that of a place and program designed for and by teachers to use voluntarily for their professional and personal development. The philosophical basis of the program includes the assumption that learners learn in answer to their own questions based on their own needs and interests and that change in individuals (as