Recruiting Diversity

By: Carol Tateishi

Summary: In this excerpt from Teachers at the Center Carol Tateishi describes efforts of the Bay Area Writing Project to recruit a diverse and representative pool of teacher-leaders.

I have always believed that the parts of the writing project model fit together like the workings of a quality watch. That is not to say there have not been glitches. For one, we depend on the talented teachers who become our TCs to recommend other talented teachers for the Invitational Summer Institute. Naturally enough, these teachers feel most comfortable recommending teachers they know well, who are also, quite possibly, teachers they work with. Thus, while it is our intention to cast a broad net, we can very easily find ourselves fishing from a restricted pool. This is the problem that Bay Area Writing Project director Carol Tateishi decided to confront head-on almost a decade ago. Here she tells the story.

The Bay Area Writing Project has, since the beginning, been committed to diversity. We knew that if we were going to make real changes in writing education in our part of California, we would need a summer institute that mirrored ethnically and geographically the teaching population of the Bay Area, including the core cities, the bordering working-class communities, and the upper-middle-class suburbs beyond. But that wasn't happening. Despite what we thought were our best efforts, a disproportionate number of our summer fellows were white teachers from the more privileged communities.

In 1992, we decided to make a concerted effort to turn our words into action. Our priority would be increasing our diversity.

We began where we had always begun in our search for talented nominees, with our BAWP teacher-consultants. But this time we made clear our concern that if BAWP was to remain relevant to the teachers of the Bay Area, we needed the participation of more teachers of color. We made phone calls to TCs who we thought might be particularly able to help us in our quest.

We also used a technique called "cloud seeding." This meant getting the word out in every way short of tacking notices on telephone polls. I presented at district principals' meetings in Oakland and San Francisco, followed up those meetings with calls to interested administrators, visited target schools to speak to teachers about BAWP programs, and made calls to educators we knew shared our goals.

At the same time, we realized that we should work on making our other summer programs—those that we sponsor in addition to the invitational summer institute—more accessible to a larger range of teachers. We found new ways to work with the university to restructure course fees. We also expanded our programs to include short summer courses to accommodate teachers who needed to teach summer school or were in year-round schools, and we successfully pushed to get district Title I funds to pay teachers to attend our programs.

We began to make headway in our effort to involve more African American teachers in our programs, and we made a number of inroads into new schools, particularly in Oakland, but we were still pretty unconnected to schools with large numbers of bilingual and English-language learners.

However, I had an idea. A few years earlier, California Tomorrow, an organization whose work I have always admired, published a work—Crossing the School House Border—which featured teachers who were making a difference in highly diverse classrooms. I called Moyra Contraras and Judy Bebelaar, two BAWP TCs profiled in the book, to check out other featured teachers particularly strong in the field of bilingual teaching. Armed with their recommendations, I made cold calls to this handful of teachers I didn't even know. Looking back now, I wonder at myself, explaining to these teachers why I was calling and asking them to apply to the BAWP Invitational Summer Institute, without their even knowing if they would be accepted and, in most cases, knowing very little about BAWP other than its name.

One of these calls, however, paid off big. That was the call to Winnie Porter, a Latina who had immigrated to the United States when she was about four. Winnie was a K-2 Spanish bilingual teacher at Cesar Chavez Elementary School in San Francisco's Mission District. Winnie seemed unfazed by my unexpected call, and she was interested in BAWP. However, in addition to teaching, Winnie was a leader in the National Education Association, and because of this role, every summer she had responsibilities in Washington, D.C. But I persevered for the next few years, and finally Winnie had a summer free, came to the institute, and immediately afterward began nominating other teachers from her school. Three came. Eventually, even the principal came. This group has been a wellspring of an ongoing stream of new summer fellows. They have helped make possible a number of new BAWP programs that are dependent on the leadership of bilingual and ESL teachers.

Looking back at our efforts to build a more representative writing project, I'm aware that we put to work several techniques more associated with selling home improvements than with drawing distinguished teachers into a highly regarded professional development program. We asked our TCs to provide us with leads, we engaged in cloud seeding to get the word of our product out through every possible avenue, we provided economically attractive deals, we made cold calls to likely prospects, and we depended on the word of mouth of our satisfied customers.

This proactive work has made a huge difference. Our bench is now deep with teacher-consultants and friends in the Bay Area education community who are part of our diversity building effort. Our programs are designed to attract to the institute teachers who may have been invisible otherwise, and our numerous partnerships with schools in low-income communities are a rich source of new knowledge and the mentoring of new teachers.

Through all this, our goal has remained the same: to address issues of equity in Bay Area schools by increasing our project's capacity to improve the teaching and learning of writing in the diverse classrooms of the Bay Area.

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