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Articles Conference Reviews |
F.5 Connections with K-12 Educators and BeyondF.5 Broadening Our Community to Reaffirm Connections with K-12 Educators and Beyond Chair: Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, NWP, Berkeley Speakers:
In as much as our terministic screens become our trained incapacities, I was both surprised, and not surprised, by the ways in which this early Friday morning session complemented the past and future of the National Writing Project, and how the presentation as a whole also complemented Thursday’s morning session (A.39) on the past and future of English Journal. Chaired by Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, Director of the National Programs and Site development for the National Writing Project, the session opened with a presentation by Anne Herrington about the NWP collaboration between UMass and a nearby elementary school. Herrington began by describing the mission of the NWP, which is guided by “respect [for] teacher expertise wherever it lies” and a participatory “distributive model of leadership” that both elicits and develops professional expertise through cross-level collaborations. Herrington spoke optimistically about the NWP as a “model” for “teaching, inquiry, and public advocacy” and noted that current projects are immersed in inquiry about the potential benefits of technological and related pedagogical innovation for English Language Learning, among other fields of teaching and learning. A journalist for ten years before becoming an elementary school teacher, Kevin Hodges described the NWP as “teachers teaching teachers” and considers his own experience with NWP projects as his primary mentoring. Hodges described how his participation in a four-week NWP summer institute shaped his composition pedagogy. Hodges characterized the institute as a “praxis think tank” that offered time for reflection upon one’s own teaching practices and to “figure out possibilities.” Such summer programs provide “communities of practice” in which to talk about what’s working, what’s not working, and how to develop social as well as professional networks. Thus inspired, Hodges developed a project to engage 250 urban and rural middle school students collaboratively through an online writing space. He wanted to bridge the geographical gap between students in both kinds of environments through blogging and other web-based platforms, ultimately creating an online community that would cross boundaries of misconceptions and myths about one another. Unfortunately, time ran out for him to share details of specific exchanges among the students who participated in the project. In the absence of the third speaker, Chair Elyse Eidman-Aadahl closed the session with a brief history of the NWP, noting that from its founding at Berkeley in 1974 until 1991, its programs thrived without federal support. Eidman-Aadahl remarked that, over the course of its history, the NWP has helped foster “deep connections between people who value writing” at all levels. She noted that in literature departments early on conversation about the teaching of writing was a “counter-cultural experience,” perhaps as talk of cultivating a professional relationship with K-12 educators might be considered today. Eidman-Aadahl’s brief historical overview and its exigencies confirms that, although schooling has changed radically in the nearly forty years since the Bay Area Writing Project responded to the “lack of preparedness” for college writing at Berkeley in the 1970s, the more things change the more they stay the same. What began as a short-term project developed into a national movement in over 200 locations across the country, based on the assumption that participants are both teachers and learners, shifting and exchanging these roles as they collaborate in NWP institutes and the projects they inspire. Eidman-Aadahl conceded that federal funding allowed the NWP to help local sites get started. However, while the short-term future of the NWP is uncertain, its long-term future is intact, in her view. Creative funding opportunities exist, she suggested. I left this session on the National Writing Project with renewed optimism about the prospects and possibilities for the kinds of cross-level collaborations the English Journal session advocated and urged, more hopeful that such partnerships might be sought and valued by teachers and students alike. I went off to the meeting of K-12 and college-level teachers of writing and English Education with some hope that Lil Brannon’s early morning call of the day before (in session A.39) was already being answered. |