OVERVIEW
***Now accepting applications for our 2027 cohort!***
Program dates: January 10th-May 30th, 2027
Applications due September 25th, 2026
The Tidelines Institute Teaching Fellowship, now in its second year, is designed to bring early career educators to the rural community of Gustavus in order to deepen the educational offerings at the local public school. Its secondary aim is to serve as an apprenticeship in teaching for our fellows—taking young people of great promise and talent and giving them an intellectually rigorous and practical grounding in what it means to teach well. The fellowship has four main components: student teaching and leading extracurriculars at the Gustavus School, a humanities seminar on education at Tidelines, time for career reflection and mentorship, and labor in service of the fellowship community. If you are interested in applying, please first read a longer description of the fellowship in this Letter to Potential Applicants.
TO APPLY
Applications are due September 25th, 2026. To apply, please send a cover letter, resume, and the contact information of two references to Good River Campus Director Tanner Horst (tanner@tidelinesinstitute.org) and to Co-Executive Director Laura Marcus (laura@tidelinesinstitute.org).
QUALIFICATIONS
Required:
- Age 22 or older
- College degree or equivalent experience
- Ability to pass a background check
- Passionate interest in education
Preferred:
- Prior teaching experience
- Strong work ethic, personal resilience and flexibility
- Ability to live well in community
- Capacity for self-reflection and giving constructive peer feedback
- Strong reading, writing, and discussion skills
ACTIVITIES/RESPONSIBILITIES
- Attend seminar twice a week for ~2 hours each session, complete all readings and assignments (up to 5 pages of writing a week, up to 500 pages of reading a week)
- Attend peer debrief sessions once a week
- Work on personal writing, reflection, and career development through weekly journaling and conversations with a designated mentor
- Teach in the Gustavus public schools for ~15 hours a week, in addition to preparing lesson plans and necessary materials for those teaching hours
- Perform needful labor and chores for ~10 to 15 hours a week
VOLUNTEER AGREEMENT
Fellows will be officially categorized as volunteers for the organization. The stipend is a living stipend,
meant to make this fellowship economically possible for a wider range of candidates. Fellows will receive:
- Room (private bedroom in a shared house) and board (communal breakfast and dinner, access to the Tidelines pantry), a stipend of $700 a month (which can go towards course books and incidental expenses)
- An experience of close-knit and rigorous intellectual community
- Living in and exploring a beautiful and wild place
- Practical experience teaching students of different ages and needs
- Time for self-reflection and career mentorship
- One week without teaching obligations (during the school’s spring break—the week of March 21)
SAMPLE SCHEDULE
8:00: You and one other teaching fellow cook scrambled eggs (with eggs from our chickens), sauteed veggies, and sausage for everyone for breakfast.
8:30-10:30: It is a seminar day! Today you are discussing Simone Weil’s essay, “The Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.”
10:30: You pack up a lunch (leftover rockfish curry and rice from dinner the night before) and bike twenty minutes to the school.
11:00-11:50: You are helping out with 9th grade English. Today, your mentor teacher has asked you to plan a lesson and you lead the students through a creative writing world-building exercise inspired by The Hobbit, the novel that the class is currently reading.
11:50 – 1:00: After chatting with some of the teachers over lunch, you head next door to the Gustavus Public Library for some quiet time to read The Dispossessed, a novel that’s been circulating through the Tidelines community, and to do some prep for the next day of teaching.
1:00-1:50: You are back at the school to help out in the 4th and 5th grade class. Today, the students are making prints from nature drawings they’ve done and you help guide them through the process.
1:50-3:30: You head to the community center, where you go to the gym, and then you bike back to campus.
4:00-6:00: Time for your teaching debrief workshop! This week, everyone has been asked to film themselves teaching and you are discussing what worked well and what didn’t.
6:30: You and the other fellows eat dinner together—tonight it’s black bean chili and cornbread.
7:30: It’s your night to do dishes. After getting everything cleaned up, the fellows all decide to crank up the woodstove and play cards until it’s time for bed.
REFLECTIONS FROM FORMER FELLOWS
“I often think back to when I tried moose meat for the first time in the Gustavus school cafeteria on my fourth day in town, having absolutely no idea what I’d gotten myself into. I am still struck by the warmth of the community at the school, by people willing to share their precious moose meat with total strangers, so generously excited to welcome us onto their team. That feeling of being on a team as an educator proved enormously important: the fellowship of the fellows gave us a rigorous, joyful space where we could problem-solve, sharpen our confidence, and experiment. Living and learning alongside the other fellows changed my standards for teaching for good. I will forever strive to immerse myself in close connection with my colleagues and cultivate in my work a community of people who trust each other, push each other, learn from each other, and stay sane through friendship.
I’m now the Program Director at Mighty Writers West Philly, a nonprofit where I teach kids to write. Day to day that means lesson planning, dreaming up writing prompts and projects, reading aloud, and sneaking books into backpacks whenever I can, alongside the less glamorous work of passing out granola bars, tying shoes, and dominating at Connect 4. At the heart of my work is one-on-one time with students as they practice articulating their unique and absolutely wonderful selves into words on paper.”
-Eleanor, 2026 Teaching Fellow
“The bike rides to school on icy dirt roads, the sunlit seminar room overlooking our fire-warmed cabin, the quirky and hysterical kids of little-big Gustavus: all these and more have already become core memories on a level with any other experience in my life. It would be hard (I dare say impossible) to find another such place—one where you could learn so much about yourself, others, and our world in such little time. From here, I am grateful to carry forward the lessons of Tidelines to my next position as a Teaching Assistant of Philosophy at the University of Utah, where I hope to build on the theoretical and practical foundations of education that Tanner, Celia, and Laura so expertly laid—or rather, galvanized us into laying for ourselves.”
-Logan, 2026 Teaching Fellow