NWP Speaks: 30 Years of Writing Project Voices

By: Barbara Bass, Eileen Simmons, Jenny Orton, Pat Mumford, Jennifer Meka, Jonathan Lovell, Richard Louth, Judith Jester, Bud Hunt, Kevin Hodgson, Shel Hershinow, Jim Davis, Julie Conason, Deborah Beis, Molly Toussant
Publication: The Voice, Vol. 10, No. 1
Date: 2005

Summary: In this final installment of short personal essays, writing project teachers and site leaders describe a time they were able to make a difference because of their connection with the writing project...

Learning from the Experts
by Barbara Bass

Several years ago, I was asked to teach a course in American literature to a group of 21 young Japanese women visiting our university. Some had very little English, and I, of course, had no Japanese. I went in the first day with slides and a selection from Huckleberry Finn, where all American literature begins, according to Hemingway. I anticipated a lively interchange. Of course, there was none. I learned too late that Japanese students are taught to sit and listen, and, out of respect for their teachers, never to question or even participate.

For the next class, things were different. I brought in children's books on Dickinson, Frost, Sandburg, and Whitman, as well as chart paper and magic markers, all of which I had learned about from my elementary school colleagues in the writing project. I divided the class into groups; gave each [group] chart paper, a poetry book, and permanent markers; and asked them to illustrate one of the poems. The results were amazing: intuitive, creative, and insightful. Without the example of the elementary teachers in the writing project, I would never have thought of these strategies for my college classes.

*****

A Poetry Slam That Worked
by Diane Barrie

A poetry slam. Would my students buy into it? What seventh-grader in his right mind would want to recite—much less perform—a poem in front of 400 of his peers? I needed a hook, and I needed help.

I knew where to get the latter: from my writing project colleagues. Judy had done slams with her eighth grade class and poetry readings at coffee shops. Mary gave me contact information for a poet-in-residence to inspire, motivate, and help rehearse my poets. I also drew upon all I had learned through the project, especially the idea that writing for an authentic audience helps motivate writers to be more willing to write, rewrite, and share their writing. And I found my hook: my own writing, my own poem that I actually found the courage to sing in front of my students and colleagues.

All this came together. The slam worked. Students buzzed about it for weeks. Imagine a nonathletic event that inspires this kind of enthusiasm. Without the writing project it wouldn't have happened.

*****

Never Too Old
by Deborah Beis

One of our cleaners at school enrolled in a nearby community college. She is 46 years old, has raised four children, and has cleaned at our school for about 20 years. Last fall she brought me a paper that she had written and asked me to proofread it. She brought it to me because she had heard that I know something about writing.

I did not want to just edit her writing with a red pen. I wanted to talk with her about it, because that's what I've learned from the writing project. Reflective discourse and nonjudgmental questions are the most effective tools when conferencing with a writer.

We met and discussed her work on her break one night. Since then, she has brought me every paper she's written.

Participants at the 2004 National Writing Project Annual Meeting in Indianapolis write to the prompt during the general session.

The Art of Listening
by Julie Conason

Recently I had my graduate teaching fellows read some of Frank Smith's Book of Learning and Forgetting. One of Smith's central premises is that we learn from the company we keep. In our seminar conversations, I emphasized that "in order for you to be the teachers you want to be, you must become the people from whom your students want to learn. This comes from taking a `listener stance' with students and bringing them to the understanding that as a teacher you actually want to know them—in the same way that I want to know you." I know that my thinking about this comes not just via Smith but is deeply informed by the writing project colleagues with whom I've worked over the past decade or so.

About a week ago in our graduate seminar, one of these beautifully earnest first-year teaching fellows said, "I've been thinking so hard about what you said about becoming the person my students want to learn from, and I think it's beginning to happen. They're no longer complaining about Lord of the Flies. They've started to grudgingly confess that maybe it might be a good book . . . but I think it's because I've been listening more to them."

*****

Old Lesson, New Use
by Jim Davis

The writing project is about putting the expertise and creativity of our colleagues to our own purposes. As a site director, I had been fortunate to observe writing project teacher-consultant Mildred Toney's practice. A reading/writing resource teacher with a proclivity for working with struggling students, she sat with a fourth-grader and his spelling paper. Despite studying hard, he had missed seven out of ten words and was distraught. Mildred pointed to the first word and asked him why it was marked wrong. The boy pointed to the single letter that had been his misstep. Mildred asked him how many letters the word contained. "So you made the wrong choice in one out of seven letters," she said. "Well, we can work on that." A few minutes later, he acknowledged having "missed seven out of 83 letters." He could work on that.

Years later, in a six-traits training session, we were asked to identify the errors in a student paragraph. Thinking of Mildred, I chose instead to notice the number of correct choices the student had made in composing the paragraph. Errors paled into insignificance by comparison. Sharing those numbers from Mildred's perspective made a difference to some teachers around me, otherwise inclined to confuse rubric rating with meaningful supportive response.

*****

A Different Person
by Shel Hershinow

At the first summer institute I conducted in 1989, a young woman named Allison Place from the island of Molokai turned out to be a former student of mine. She had experienced me as a teacher before she was married and before I had experienced my own life-changing participation in a Hawaii Writing Project Summer Institute. During the 1989 institute, other fellows kept asking Allison, "What was he like as a teacher?" She always replied, "He was a different person."

*****

Rural Meets Urban
by Kevin Hodgson

During the summer institute, I developed a personal connection with a colleague from an inner-city district. Together we developed a pen-pal creative-writing program that merged writing with reading and, just as important, developed a connection between my rural students and her urban students. When the two groups met at the end of the project, after some awkward introductions, we stood back and watched these young people of different economic, social, and racial backgrounds connect on a very powerful level. It all began with writing, and it all began with the writing project.

*****

My Legacy Begins
by Bud Hunt

Wednesday. This week. Denver International Airport. I was on the way to our annual meeting. I'd had a bad day. Substitute plans took too long, students were noisy, and one student had even disappeared. I was in no mood to go through the airport security. After removing my shoes, my belt, all metal objects, and what was left of my dignity, I ventured toward the gate where I would meet up with the other Colorado State University Writing Project folks with whom I would be flying.

My day turned on a dime. "We used your stuff, and my kids loved it!" The exclamation came from a teacher who was in our summer institute last summer, the institute where I had given my demo on multigenre writing. She had taken the ideas I shared back to her school. She told me of the kids who never wrote who were now writing, the kids who didn't work who now did extra work. That's the start of my legacy: a kid somewhere, whom I don't know, who has had a good writing experience. Thank you, NWP, for helping me to make a difference. Thank you for warming my heart and softening the blows that distract me from my teaching. I'm only a third-year teacher, but I belong here.

*****

Rocio's Second Thoughts
by Judy Jester

Rocio is taking an SAT prep class this year. Of course, many other high school students are too; so what's the big deal? It seems that until this past spring, this bright young girl was going to be a beautician. Many factors may have influenced her decision to pursue college, but one of them, I believe, was her participation in a research project I conducted.

A few years ago, when Rocio was my student, I studied the effect of literature circles on (to use the jargon) the cognitive academic language proficiency of my English language learners. In short, I was looking to see whether engaging in authentic discussions with their peers would foster these students' growth in the language of school. When I wrote of this experience at an NWP writing retreat, I realized I needed to know more, and so I wrote a grant to continue working with Rocio and other English language learners in my high school.

We read and discussed books together throughout the year. The students' cognitive language did improve and, more important, so did their confidence as academic learners. Rocio and I talked the other day about college visits. I'm confident this conversation wouldn't have happened without NWP.

*****

Making Connections
by Richard Louth

I think of the people I have had the honor of working with and connecting with during my involvement with the writing project. I'm thinking that while I have helped make some difference myself as a result of something I've said or responded to, the biggest differences I've made are through connections the writing project has allowed me to facilitate. Because I was there Melanie met Gary who met Kim Stafford who met George and Tracy, who met Ann Dobie, and so on. NWP allowed me to "be there," and being there, I was able to bring together great teachers and writers and human beings, not just across my "service area," but across the state and country.

As any participant will attest, writing project summer institutes are engaging experiences. Pictured here are participants of the Bay Area Writing Project's first summer institute, held in 1974. (James Gray, founder of the National Writing Project, is seated second from right.)

Getting Personal
by Jonathan Lovell

Most people with writing project connections have stories about how they were able to make a difference professionally because of the writing project. I have these stories, but I also, with writing project help, have been able to make a difference in my own family. In 1983, as a newly selected and insecure faculty member at the University of Nevada, I was being considered by the teachers in the Northern Nevada Writing Project as a potential co-director. As part of my tryout, I led a workshop of middle school teachers through the process of writing a family story as seen through the eyes of another family member.

By way of a model, I wrote through my father's eyes about a cruise we'd taken off the Maine coast when I was in junior high, my father serving as the skipper of our 36-foot sloop. I focused particularly on the final day of that cruise, when we had to make our way through dense fog to port. I wrote about "my" sense of apprehension and uncertainty, the sense that I was traveling in near blindness toward an elusive and perhaps treacherous destination. At the conclusion of my piece, I wrote directly to my father, explaining that this moment had come back to me at a time I was seeing my own future as uncertain and fraught with potential peril.

I sent the piece to my father, and he wrote a long letter in reply. This exchange began a correspondence between us that lasted until his death in December 2003. Without my writing project experiences, I am certain that I would never have had the courage to write such a letter, nor to initiate the deep personal connection I enjoyed with my father in the final decades of his life.

*****

NWP Was There
by Jennifer Meka

As coordinator of our site's teen writing workshop, I had the heart-wrenching job of reading requests for scholarships to designate which students we could support financially in attending. The letters were all personal, detailing situations of hardship in varying degrees. Fortunately, this year we were able to give scholarships to all ten students who requested aid. One student's request was especially trying. He had attended for the three previous summers and in the spring his father had been diagnosed with cancer and was undergoing treatment. He wanted a scholarship because money was obviously tight and he thought the friends he would reconnect with would help keep his mind off the home situation.

The first day of camp, the boy arrived with a note from his mother explaining that his father had died the week before, but he needed to attend because of how much our workshop, teachers, and students meant to him. One more case of the writing project making a difference.

*****

The Kings of the School
by Pat Mumford

My third-graders learned lessons bigger than life as we wrote weekly about our trips to watch a new mall added to our inner-city surroundings. They wrote; they wondered; they bonded through their writing. Whenever these [eager students] arrived, the construction workers . . . would shed their labor-bound rules in order to to greet them, teach them, and encourage them to stay in school.

Donning their yellow plastic hard hats as we left the building each week, the students were kings of the school, important, valued: they were going places! So we wrote from the mall's foundation until its grand opening. I still see their faces proudly watching their community grow. It was my experience as a writing project teacher that taught me the importance of moving students from a small world into a larger one through the power of writing.

*****

The Why of Writing
by Jenny Orton

On the day I returned to the classroom after experiencing my third NWP summer institute, I arrived with a new understanding. The writing project had taught me the why of writing. My personal love of writing had long infused my teaching, but that was not enough to convince my hormone-charged eighth-graders to write. I had to help them discover the why.

Now they write to protest the lack of sandwiches at the second lunch hour. They write to celebrate a friend's success or birthday. They write to honor a parent or sister as their hero. They write love notes, comic strips, and poems about their adolescent angst. They write to create an escape hatch and to flex their gray-matter muscles. They write because they know why.

*****

The Most Valuable Lesson
by Eileen Simmons

My most valuable learning from the writing project has been to stop my teacher behavior and think from a student point of view. This means understanding that acting out is often the result of fear of failure at trying something new.

Last year, I had most of the members of the ninth grade girls' basketball team in my class. Every time I introduced a new skill, the team refused to do the assignment, refused to even try. Thank goodness I had learned enough from my NWP teacher inquiry to know that responding through confrontation wasn't going to work. I thought of an alternate strategy and invited the team for extra help. And thanks to their coach, they spent as many as three hours a day with me. I treasure the time spent with those girls. They taught me as much as I taught them. Learning from students, being open to observation, and being curious about why students respond as they do are the best lessons the writing project can teach.

*****

Taking Charge
by Molly Toussant

The writing project, by insisting on the power of writing, has helped me understand the importance of writing as a source of personal authority, a recognition I want my students to also grasp. On the morning of November 3, 2004, I found out that the election had not gone my way. I was feeling alone in my need to be questioning and reflective and hopeful that things could be better. As I got dressed and prepared for my day, I knew I had to write, and because of that understanding, I knew I wasn't powerless. "I must be the change if I wish to see change in the world," I wrote.

My classroom is the place to start. My students will write each day and think (question, reflect, respond) as writers. This will be my way of inviting them to become active participants in our democracy. What better way than this to affect the future of our nation?