This article about Greg Loselle appeared in the Grosse Ile Township Schools' community newsletter, The Bridge, in September of 2000.

With the dust settling from Homecoming activities, most students and faculty have resigned themselves to saying goodbye to the experiences they had over the summer. For one teacher, however, the summer's work is just getting started.

GIHS English and Humanities teacher Gregory Loselle was one of fifteen teachers chosen from across the country for acceptance to a special seminar at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, this summer. Sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, mr. Loselle spent six weeks studying and discuss the work of three Renaissance Humanists under the guidance of Duke History Professor Ronald Witt. "It was a great experience--good for me both as learner and teacher," says Loselle. "Teachers don't often get a chance to sit down together and discuss their subject matter together as students of a discipline."

The seminar, like two previous ones he has attended, gathers like-minded teacher-scholars together to examine a specific topic in depth. Titled "The Humanist as Reformer: Petrarch, Machiavelli and Erasmus," this seminar focussed on the culture of the early Renaissance. "These are seminal figures," comments Loselle. "Petrarch led learning away from the domination of the Church, toward more secular concerns and the influence of Greece and Rome. Machiavelli was the first modern politician--his work was about government as a political, rather than a theological, construct."

The seminar class met every morning, four days a week, to discuss these writers and their works. They also made specific presentations of particular works or related figures from history. "I worked on Erasmus," Loselle said, "particularly on the Discourse on Free Will. It was his response to Martin Luther." Other students had other topics--the life and death of Sir Thomas More, for instance, or Machiavelli's play, The Mandragola.

"These classes were run very much like my AP courses" Loselle notes, "We would discuss aspects of the works and question their meaning and relevance both in their times and our own. It was a lot of fun to participate without having to be in charge, though." The pace of study was quick, however: some of the participants were fluent in Latin and French, the original languages of some of the works they studied, Loselle adds, and that kept the discussions lively. "It was a high caliber group, but that's part of the fun."

In free moments, Mr. Loselle and the others explored the Duke campus and the surrounding are of Raleigh-Durham. "The grounds of Duke are beautiful--very thickly wooded and very lush. They even have bamboo!" he said. "And the university is beautiful architecturally, too. I hope to use some of my pictures when we get to gothic architecture in the AP Humanities class." Trips to local museums and libraries--and an evening watching a Durham Bulls baseball game--rounded out the experience.

The real work, however, is only just beginning. Loselle has applied for another grant to place the papers and other materials from the seminar on the World Wide Web. "It's a way of giving back," he notes. Parts of the web site, still under construction, can be found at http://www.bitworx.com/gl/duke.htm. "This way we can share our summer work with a broader circle of scholars and teachers. There's no telling how far this could reach."

First published June 10, 2002;

last updated June 18, 2002

Copyright 2002, GJL