Two New Directors Have Longtime NWP Roots

By: Art Peterson
Publication: The Voice, Vol. 8, No. 4
Date: Fall 2003

Summary: In an ongoing series, The Voice profiles directors of new writing project sites each year. This year NWP has added ten new sites, and over the next few issues, you'll be learning more about each of their leaders. Here Antonio Tendero, director of the Lake Michigan Writing Project, and Cindy O'Donnell-Allen, director of the Colorado State University Writing Project, are introduced.

In an ongoing series, The Voice profiles directors of new writing project sites each year. This year NWP has added ten new sites, and over the next few issues, you'll be learning more about each of their leaders. Below we introduce Antonio Tendero, director of the Lake Michigan Writing Project, and Cindy O'Donnell-Allen, director of the Colorado State University Writing Project.

Anthony Tendero, Director

Anthony Tendero admits he got the itch to establish a writing project site in Western Michigan about the time he was becoming increasingly nostalgic about his former life as a middle school teacher. Tendero now works with preservice teachers at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, but his teaching chops were honed working with eighth-graders.

"I enjoy working with preservice teachers," he says, "but I came to miss classrooms and middle school kids. I wanted to have my work more grounded in the schools. I believe my writing project work will help me keep a classroom connection."

But another piece of Tendero's past also motivated his urge to launch a writing project site in the Grand Rapids area. "I had only been teaching a year when a job came up in Fairfax County, Virginia. Someone directed me to Marian Mohr, at the time co-director of the Northern Virginia Writing Project (NVWP), who, it was said, would be able to tell me all about teaching in that area." After his conversation with Mohr, Tendero took the job in Virginia and was recruited into the NVWP summer institute.

"This experience changed me irrevocably as a teacher. My experience in the Northern Virginia Writing Project was so profoundly positive that I felt I wanted to be part of creating a similar experience for teachers in West Michigan."

Tendero has had some immediate successes in Michigan. For his first summer institute, he managed to "find fourteen quality fellows and three wonderful co-directors." This nucleus, he hopes, will be the beginning of a writing project movement that will allow "teacher voices to shape conversations about writing instruction in West Michigan."

Tendero knows, however, that the challenges are just beginning. "We'll be working with a big city school district, living with the struggles of its teachers and students, trying to establish partnerships." And then there is the whole issue of standardized writing tests and how they are being used by administrators and communities. "Whenever we discuss this issue with teachers," Tendero says, "they get that deer-in-the-headlights look." But Tendero believes teachers do not need to remain isolated, fearful, and immobilized. "We are hoping that as our numbers and influence grow, discussions about literacy learning in the Grand Rapids area will benefit from a new, powerful, and professional set of voices."

Cindy O'Donnell-Allen, Director

As a high school student, Cindy O'Donnell-Allen knew one thing about her future. "I don't know what I'll be, but I will never be a teacher," she told her high school English teacher.

But that was before she went away to college and began the stretch from adolescence to adulthood. One midnight, two years later, O'Donnell-Allen called that same English teacher, Kelly Ford, and announced, "Kelly, guess what. I'm changing my major to English." It was, in fact, Ford's teaching that influenced her decision to study English, and then teach it. "Kelly's approach to teaching writing was different, so different that all of us noticed. Every day, he began class with writing, and we regularly read what we'd written to one another, and we were allowed to help one another and make changes."

Kelly Ford, readers may have already deduced, was a writing project guy, from the Oklahoma Writing Project (OWP) to be specific. The next chapter in the story is equally predictable. "If the writing project were a sorority, I guess I'd be considered a `legacy,'" says O'Donnell-Allen. A few years into her first teaching job, Ford called and said he had already written the letter of application recommending her to the OWP summer institute.

"I became a member of OWP in 1992, then a member of the project's governing board and facilitator of the site's teacher-research group."

When she moved to Colorado, where she is now beginning her fifth year as an assistant professor in the Department of English at Colorado State University (CSU), O'Donnell-Allen considered herself a writing project "orphan." "I'd wander forlornly around the NWP Annual Meeting until I found my OWP buddies, but it's true you can never really go home again."

So with the encouragement of fellow Oklahoman and NWP Associate Director Joye Alberts, O'Donnell-Allen applied for an NWP site to be based at CSU. Explaining her reasons for creating the new Colorado site, O'Donnell-Allen cites the Marge Piercy poem "To Be of Use": "The pitcher cries for water to carry/And a person for work that is real." Says O'Donnell-Allen, "I know of no other work that is more `real,' that is making a bigger direct difference in schools than the National Writing Project."

Part of the difference O'Donnell-Allen hopes to make in Colorado is to "provide an antidote to the formulaic writing and literacy instruction that has taken hold in response to high-stakes testing." And she already has evidence that she has some allies in advancing the work of the new site. "We've been able to secure matching funds in a state that has decimated its funding for education. That's how much people believe in the writing project."

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