NWP Copublishes Two Books on Literacy and Community

By: Judith Bess
Publication: The Voice, Vol. 10, No. 1
Date: 2005

Summary: Two books recently copublished by the NWP invite teachers to see themselves as composers of community identity: Writing America: Classroom Literacy and Public Engagement, edited by Sarah Robbins and Mimi Dyer, and Writing Our Communities: Local Learning and Public Culture, edited by Dave Winter and Sarah Robbins...

Two books recently copublished by the National Writing Project invite teachers to see themselves as cultural stewards and cultural creators—actual composers of community identity. Both books spring from Keeping and Creating American Communities (KCAC), a multiyear curriculum development project funded by the National Endowment for Humanities and the National Writing Project. In Writing America: Classroom Literacy and Public Engagement, edited by Sarah Robbins and Mimi Dyer and copublished with Columbia University's Teachers College Press, eleven teachers describe their classroom experiences as they implement programs based on KCAC's guiding principles. Writing Our Communities: Local Learning and Public Culture, edited by Dave Winter and Sarah Robbins and copublished with the National Council of Teachers of English, offers a variety of lesson plans that revolve around students engaging with their communities.

The Keeping and Creating American Communities program emphasizes two basic tenets. "Keeping" community invites students to participate in cultural stewardship. In this role, students critically examine cultural forces operating in their communities and consciously join in civic preservation. They do community-based research such as gathering local stories, interpreting public history sites, and analyzing visual culture in their environments. The "creating" component of the project encourages students to see themselves as active composers of their communities' identities. As the essays in both books reveal, the teachers participating in the program have been more than successful at bringing about these ends.

KCAC's guiding principles emphasize the role that writing can play in creating communities; the power of collaboration; the potential inherent in cross-level, interdisciplinary study of community life; and the need to view research as open-ended inquiry using a wide range of methods to study diverse cultural artifacts. The KCAC program had a distinct focus in each of its three years. In the first year, teachers themselves conducted inquiry-based research into community life. The second year, teachers tried to develop classroom teaching strategies based on those experiences. The third year focused on dissemination.

In part I of Writing America, "Community Studies in the Classroom," six of the teacher-authors describe their experiences inviting students to research local culture, and explain the impact that this process has had on their classroom communities. Several begin by describing their own first forays into community research. One teacher visits her hometown, San Antonio, Texas; goes with her father to the neighborhood where he grew up; and comes to realize how and why the places interacted with people to create her cultural community. She returns to school, eager to give her students a similar experience, and creates a "My Place" project, in which students take pictures and write about a place that is significant in their lives.

In part II, "Public Literacy Projects and Civic Culture," the teachers describe projects in which students moved outside the classroom to become culture-making agents. One teacher, who had headed the team that created the KCAC website, became convinced of the value of collaboration in keeping and creating community, as well as the energy that meaningful research generates. So she revamped her senior project, changing it into one that required her students to participate in collaborative, community-based research. Students formed teams to research such issues as cuts in the local school budget, the proposed sale and demolition of a local rock-climbing area to a real-estate developer, pollution in the river, and the economic impact of 9/11 on the city. They chose their own teams, issues, and product formats. As a result, the research process itself was exciting, and students felt ownership of their work. Some of their products were outstanding: letters to members of Congress; Web pages; PowerPoint presentations; and video documentaries, one of which aided in the successful grassroots effort to save the climbing area.

Each of the teachers in Writing America chronicles his or her inspirations, misgivings, triumphs, and occasional failures to give not only a compelling narrative but a useful model for teachers who wish to shift from a cognitive, individual conception of literacy to a social one.

The authors of Writing Our Communities have shaped their experiences into immediately usable lesson plans, organized by how they fit into the larger curriculum. The first section, "Introductory Activities," includes strategies for introducing writing-intensive community studies in minilessons that last less than a class period. The second section, "Single-Class-Period Activities," extends these strategies to daily lessons or multiple, linked activities. The third section, "Units/Major Assignments," includes fully developed research units organized around core principles for studying community life. The final section, "Extended Research Projects," presents lessons that build on those principles after they have been established in the classroom. These extended projects became the primary course objectives for both the teachers who assigned them and the students who completed them.

The lessons are transportable across grade level, student ability, and discipline. Each chapter includes the teacher's overview, the instructional sequence, handouts (if needed), student artifacts, the teacher's reflections, and suggestions for adapting the lesson for different classroom settings.

The authors describe the student writing as "artifacts" in order to signal that they see their classrooms as significant cultural spaces, where records of community life are constantly being made through students' composing processes, and that such artifacts should be treasured. Teachers are invited to give the samples of student work to their own classes to critique. Many of the student texts come from writing-to-learn activities and are purposely included as they were originally drafted in order to illustrate that much of the community-building writing done in classrooms can be exploratory—unpolished yet productive as a critical thinking tool. The authors hope that students and teachers will use these pieces to consider together how some of them might be extended, revised, and polished into more formal products.

NWP sites will a receive complimentary copy of each book in February. Order yours now!