Greetings Friends and Colleagues,

How do you make the most out of technology in the classroom?

Teachers across the country shared their stories on February 1st, 2012 at the first annual Digital Learning Day. Created by the Alliance for Excellence in Education, and in partnership with the National Writing Project, this nationwide event celebrates innovative teaching and learning across the country.

For many NYCWP teachers every day is filled with digital writing and learning. Below are a few of the February 1st highlights from Paul Allison’s classroom. Paul teaches mixed-grade ELA at Bronx Academy Senior High, and is the NYCWP technology liaison. His students participate actively on Youth Voices (www.youthvoices.net), a NYCWP-supported online community that provides a forum for student writing, inquiry and multimedia publication:

• Justin used Audiotool to write a song, “Sour and Better,” and when he posted it, he attached a photograph from the Youth Voices Flickr group, “glow stick fun” by Danny Sayre, a photographer from a high school in Salt Lake City.
• Stephanie posted a 4:26 minute video, “Detox 2.1.12 Chemistry/English Project,” discussing a research project on the effects of marijuana that she had been doing for both of these classes.

Paul is one of countless teachers in the NYCWP network committed to living digital learning with the young people in their classrooms. Samples of other digital classroom work and discussions of the thinking behind it can been seen on the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site.

So what are your students up to in the digital world? We want to hear about it.

If you’ve got a story to share about your students’ digital learning,  go to Digital Is and participate in the conversations about what it means to teach writing in our interconnected world today.

All my best,

Erick Gordon, Director
New York City Writing Project
Lehman College, Bronx NY

Invitational Summer Institute

Applications for the 33rd annual Summer Institute are now available online (NYCWP summer institute 2012)!

We are seeking:

• A culturally diverse group of outstanding teachers of all subject areas and grade levels who are ready to share their expertise and experience with others, or have demonstrated leadership in their work with colleagues
• Teachers with three or more years experience who can make a contribution to their school and to the work of the NYCWP

The summer institute provides opportunities to:

• Grow as a writer in a community of colleagues
• Engage in teaching and learning that can inform your practice
• Develop a workshop around a successful aspect of your teaching

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Spring Advanced Institute

Continuing the NYCWP’s work with the Common Core Learning Standards, we will offer an Advanced Institute beginning in April, with two Saturday workshops, followed by a two-week institute in July.

Participants will:

• Research and develop deep understandings of argument
• Engage in activities to explore the premise that the world can be examined as argument
• Develop a lesson/unit that creates the opportunity for students to create an argument from an object, art, or text

During the Summer Institute participants will build on their argument curriculum by designing and creating a workshop to facilitate for their own school-based professional development. The Institute will ultimately focus on the skills attached to argument and the role of those skills in developing students who are college-, career-, and life-ready.

Applications for the Advanced Summer Institute are available now—NYCWP advanced summer institute.

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Teacher to Teacher Conference

Writing with Purpose: The Personal, the Academic and Beyond
Join the NYCWP on June 2, when we invite New York City teachers to participate in our annual daylong conference during which teachers will learn and share in teacher-facilitated workshops while meeting educators from around the city. Our keynote speaker, Dr. Ernest Morrell, Director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Teachers College Columbia University, will lay the foundation for a day that will exhilarate and reinvigorate teachers.

To propose a workshop, please contact Joe Bellacero, Associate Director, jbellacero@aol.com.

To download a save-the-date flier, click here.

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Teaching for Social Justice Workshop Series, Co-Sponsored with Teachers College

Dr. Deborah Appleman, March 28

Dr. Appleman is the Hollis L. Caswell professor of educational studies and director of the Summer Writing Program at Carleton College. Professor Appleman’s recent research has focused on teaching college-level language and literature courses at the Minnesota Correctional Facility-Stillwater. A recently edited anthology of her students’ work in this project is entitled From the Inside Out: Letters to Young Men and Other Writings of Poetry and Prose from Prison.

Space is limited and by reservation ONLY. Please contact Jane Higgins, Associate Director to check availability, jane.higgins@lehman.cuny.edu.

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Summer Youth Programs, Summer 2012

Writers On Stage: Student-writers will have the opportunity to collaborate with professional teaching artists and writing coaches to research a text through writing, drama, dance, film and visual art. Students will create new texts that will be fully produced in a multimedia performance to an audience at Lehman College.

An additional summer writing program will be announced in April.

Writers on Stage applications are available now—click here.

To learn more about this opportunity now, please contact Jane Higgins, jane.higgins@lehman.cuny.edu.

This month’s selection from the NYCWP newsletter archive is from the spring 2003 issue. Suzanna McNamara’s article, “A Class of Immigrant Non-Readers Reaches Out,” describes a unit of work she developed and taught to a class of SIFE students (students with interrupted formal education). As many of us know, SIFE students are becoming an increasingly visible and widespread group among our English learner population. A first-year teacher at the time, Suzanna was exploring uncharted territory for herself and, in some ways, for teachers of ELLs, as she developed curriculum to address her students’ unique needs. What is both remarkable and relevant is the extensiveness of this project, the careful ways in which texts and activities are layered, the multiple uses of writing, and the teacher’s determination that the writing have an authentic audience.

—Edited by Ed Osterman and Diane Giorgi

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from Spring 2003

A CLASS OF IMMIGRANT NON-READERS REACHES OUT TO THE WORLD
Suzanna McNamara
Bronx International HS

Suzanna McNamara accomplished something remarkable with her ELL literacy students at The Bronx International High School last year… her first year teaching. Through writing, she and her students found a way to communicate how deeply they were touched by the true story of two women who reached out to each other across a racial and cultural divide. Suzanna, who sees her greatest challenge as teaching non-readers to integrate critical thinking with decoding skills, participated in a Writing Project inservice seminar in the fall of 2002 with Ed Osterman and Gina Moss. She was also a participant in the 2001 Advanced Seminar in Technology led by Paul Allison and Dina Heisler. She calls herself a “voyeur on the listserv,” sending out an “occasional SOS” here and there. The seminar project described here shows a teacher of enormous talent and sensitivity, courageous in her efforts and ruthless in her analysis of the execution of those efforts.

CONTEXT: My students at Bronx International High School are immigrants who have been in the United States less than four years, coming primarily from West Africa, Latin America, Macedonia and Bangladesh. They are acquiring English language and literacy skills. Many of them have limited, if any, native language literacy, although some may be able to speak as many as six languages. I try to capitalize on their somewhat proficient oral language skills. My West African students, for example, can be heard switching from Mandingo to Arabic to Fulani to French to English with relative ease, but struggle when it comes to reading and writing. My students have missed out on schooling for different reasons. Their native education may have been limited or interrupted by war, financial constraints, or possibly for other reasons. My students have not failed; they have simply not had the opportunity to go to school from kindergarten through 8th grade because of conditions beyond their control. What this translates to in the classroom are students who really value education and have a strong desire to be successful. All of us are on a journey together.

From the beginning of the semester, we have been reading and writing about connections, i.e., our individual connections to other individuals. We began with an art and writing project where students created a matrix of themselves surrounded by their connections of help and support. We read several stories about connections, including a picture book, Swimmy; a short story, “Thank You M’am”; a film, Central Station; a song, “Luka”; and a book, The New Baby. We made a list of why connections are important. We discussed connections to family, friends, teachers, girlfriends/boyfriends, community organizations, religious organizations, etc. A focus of our reading, talking and writing became connections to strangers. This was the essential theme in the central piece I chose for our class project, a letter project based on a story from the Oprah show and magazine entitled, “Can You Find it in Your Heart Not to Hate Us?” It is a story about two women from opposite sides of the world who make a connection through the mail in an attempt to end racism.

RATIONALE: I am constantly struggling with how to find accessible material for high school students who have powerful life experiences, but not age-appropriate reading skills. One day, I happened to catch an Oprah segment where I saw two women–one, a white woman from New Mexico, and the other, a black mother of two from South Africa–meet for the first time. I immediately thought of using their story in class. The next day, I obtained Oprah magazine and saw the same story in print. I was captivated by the story of these two women, one who was scared of whites because of the racially motivated death of her husband, and the other who read about the story and cried at the thought of being feared because of the color of her skin.

The text was several pages long, and dense with language. I adapted the text, simplifying the language without losing the essential elements of the true story. What followed was a three-week reading, writing, speaking and listening project that culminated in the students writing a letter to one of the two women. With new writers, I struggle with students seeing the real meaning of reading and writing—to get information about the world and communicate with the world. It is a constant challenge to get students to be concerned with the more global aspects of writing, of developing ideas and communicating them with clarity, with spelling as a final fine-tuning step. I felt that this project would be driven by authenticity, which would motivate students to write for communication, with the focus on ideas over “correctness.” I am finding that it is difficult to get students to internalize the importance of audience and not just write to please the teacher with correctly spelled words on the page. I let them know from the beginning that my intention was to send these letters to Oprah Winfrey, with the hopes that she would forward them to the women.

THE STAGES OF THE PROJECT: We started by brainstorming a definition of “racism,” as students had seen this word before in Global Studies. We then read the adapted text together as a read-aloud. I stopped occasionally to ask students to respond with questions, predictions, reactions, retelling, etc. This reading allowed for a surface discussion of the text. We made predictions for what would happen to the women next, since the text version ends with Beverly saying that she would see Adelina even if it meant that she would have to “clean every toilet on the planet.”

Students freewrote in their journals in response to the story, starting it in class and completing it for homework. We shared in class the next day.

Since we had been working on the skills of “compare and contrast,” students worked in pairs to decide what was similar and different about the two women. They were familiar with this structure. This process allowed us to discuss the universality of some experiences despite differences in race.

We discussed the larger theme of racism in the story by returning to the working definition we came up with together and looked to the text to find examples of racism there.

As a surprise, I brought the tape of the Oprah show to class, and we watched the 20-minute segment to confirm and/or disprove our predictions about what would happen with the women. They were able to see and hear more of the details of the story of Adelina’s husband’s murder in a way that they might not have sensed from our adapted text. At the end of the segment, when the two women actually met, students were choked up and the members of the studio audience were crying. That day, I learned the word “amakinikinini,” Mandingo for a feeling akin to empathy.

The next day, students freewrote in response to Oprah’s closing remark that she would pay for Adelina’s children’s education because “education is freedom.” We shared this writing in class.

After reading and watching the story, I felt that students would have an understanding of racism. I wanted them to do some personal writing. We revisited the word and then made a list of other ways people can judge you besides skin color. Students generated a long list including age, sex, religion, culture and, interestingly, education. From that discussion, we extrapolated the concept of discrimination, with racism being a specific type of discrimination. Students then wrote in their journals about a time they experienced some kind of discrimination. We shared at the beginning of class the next day.

I introduced the letter project by letting students know that just as Beverly and Adelina had made connections with each other through letters, we were going to connect with them through letters as well. They could choose which of the women they wanted to write to.

We discussed what a letter looks like and what we might write about if we wrote to one of these women. Then, with a kind of template complete with sentence starters, we could see that many of their ideas for a letter were the same that I thought of. Students began to write; some used the template, although some preferred to write in their journals.

After these first drafts, I met with students individually to confer about their writing. I chose two stronger students to work in pairs and respond to each other’s work using a protocol we had used before. The conferences clarify and reinforce that ideas are what is paramount and that proofreading comes later.

Concurrently, I  read and responded to their discrimination stories. I thought it would make their letters richer if they could share their own experiences with discrimination with Beverly and Adelina, since the letters were feeling somewhat generic. I  highlighted parts of their stories and together we tried to find a good place to insert this personal piece.

Students worked on a final piece. Most typed, although some handwrote. Some made their letters very personal.

I wanted to send a cover letter to Oprah, so I shared my draft with students. It was on a piece of loose-leaf paper with a lot of cross outs. I wanted them to see a “real” piece of writing in beginning stages. I read aloud, as they followed. I asked them what they liked and what suggestions they had; as they gave me suggestions, I jotted notes. I pointed out what I was doing in an attempt to model what good writers do.

We took a class picture. I assembled the package and sent it off to Oprah with fingers crossed!

REFLECTION: My goal was to create a project where students were motivated to write for an authentic audience, and, perhaps, with even the possibility of getting a response. I wanted them to experience taking the initiative to connect to a stranger. I not only wanted them to understand and react to a personal story, but also to the larger themes of racism and how a powerful connection can change what you think and believe. I wanted students to synthesize their reactions to Beverly’s and Adelina’s story and share some of their own experiences with discrimination. I wanted students to use low-stakes journal writing to support later high-stakes writing that would be mailed to some one who would actually read it.

With these goals in mind, I think the project was successful. Students were excited about the letters, asking me everyday if I sent them. The combination of the print read-aloud, followed by some writing and then the viewing of the show worked. The show added a rich layer that allowed the students to get more out of a story that was hard to capture completely in print. Kids were so excited to see Adelina and Beverly, as if they were actually meeting the women they had read about. The biggest success came with Haja, a girl who was brand new to school and often resistant to writing, especially outside of class. I saw her working before school and after school on her letters. She wrote to Beverly and Adelina, as well as to Oprah, thanking her for making the connection between the women possible. She put Oprah’s pictures everywhere along with drawings of her own village in Africa. The most powerful part, however, was how she shared with Adelina the story of her own father’s tragic murder by rebel forces in Sierra Leone. Her desire to connect with Adelina was that strong. Haja was so proud of her work.

Although overall I was impressed with the process and the product, there are many aspects of this project that I would revise. I was surprised that students did not focus on the racism behind the murder of Adelina’s husband. There was tremendous injustice reported in the story, yet students focused more on the connection between the women than what motivated that connection. Next time, I would think about building up this complicated concept before the reading, perhaps with visual images. That has been a general challenge: getting students to connect to larger themes, and not focus solely on the details of a story.

I thought the journal writing worked, but I might have tried a few more entries. Students are very comfortable in the class and are usually eager to share. The journal writing also serves as a good check of their comprehension. The scaffolding for the letter writing, while very helpful for some students, was too limiting for others. I often question: to what extent do structure and scaffolding help and to what extent do they hinder? I think of scaffolding activities like training wheels on a bike. If you need them, they are lifesaving and help you move ahead when you might have not been able to get started otherwise. However, if you are a more proficient rider, the training wheels slow you down and limit your freedom, direction, and speed.

I am challenged by how to deal with first drafts. The individual conferences are time consuming, but I do not know how to make pairs or group work effective. The pair I experimented with was only semi-productive. Abou worked hard to read and respond to Djnabou, but she was having a lot of difficulty processing his story. Truly, I want to do more peer work, but realize that early writing is full of errors that usually do not interfere with my comprehension, but cause problems for weaker decoders. The insertion of the personal discrimination story, while a good idea, seemed forced and less authentically generated. That might have been a good place to talk about transitions and to help students make choices about where and how to insert their own stories. This would require more time. I rushed the wrap-up of the stories, and we did not share the finished products aloud, which I now know must be an essential component. It is always important to celebrate hard work.

POSTCRIPT: As of this writing (March 2003), the class has yet to receive a reply from Oprah Winfrey or her staff. It would be a harsh lesson if her response were not forthcoming. We are still hoping that her famous heart will be filled with amakinikinini for us!

This installment will feature the NYCWP’s own Amanda Nicole Gulla, whose work as a writer ranges from the academic to the poetic and whose work with students bridges both worlds.

Amanda Nicole Gulla: Poet and Professor

by Alison Koffler-Wise

In the undergraduate course she teaches at Lehman College in the Bronx, Amanda Nicole Gulla and her students explore “The Hero’s Journey” looking at the idea of the heroic quest through texts as varied as The Odyssey, The Warmth of Other Suns, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  In these wildly disparate texts, Amanda says, there is something in common—the story of the hero and the idea that we learn about the journey of our lives through story.  This awareness informs Amanda’s work as a teacher and as a writer; to her the stories we tell are a vehicle for sharing knowledge and finding our way.

Amanda’s own story is a multi-faceted one.  An Assistant Professor and Coordinator of English Education at Lehman College, City University of New York, Amanda has also worked as a public school teacher and an on-site teacher-consultant for the NYCWP.  She is also a poet.  Bridging these worlds is natural for Amanda—for her dissertation, a two-year study of what shapes a teacher’s classroom persona and her approach to teaching, Amanda used some of her teacher data and analysis to write the poems that head each chapter.  Each poem was an attempt, she says, “to capture an essential quality of each teacher’s work in the classroom,” both their practice and their persona as a teacher.  As she observed and interviewed teachers, Amanda found that one important way they improve as educators is by learning from other teachers telling and hearing about lives in the classroom.

This work has borne further fruit as past students from 2005 through 2010 become Amanda’s research collaborators, studying how practices learned in their English Education graduate courses manifest in the classroom.  Today, Amanda works with former students developing assessments for learning that go beyond standardized tests.  Her vision is that this work with these new teachers will lead to further collaboration with other educators and artists.  Amanda believes that by participating in this kind of research, and by becoming readers and producers of academic writing, teachers have a chance to empower themselves, “to have a voice in the world.”  It’s important to her to encourage more teachers to read academic writing; “There are terrible decisions being made in the world of education,” she says, “decisions teachers would not make—cutting the arts, history, language, to pay for more testing.”  Informed in many ways by her experience with the NYCWP and her passion for aesthetic education, Amanda is excited to come to the table with a variety of other talented people—academics, teachers, artists—to develop practice, write, collaborate, and teach each other.

Amanda finds that her academic writing begins with the germ of an idea that tugs at her—an idea that she begins to research and painstakingly develop.  In her life as a poet, on the other hand, Amanda says, “I wake up with something in my head,” a word or image that will provide a jumping off point for a poem.  From this serendipitous beginning, her poems are carefully crafted.  Amanda sees poetry as “a way of seeing and describing the world,” and a way to use language in a powerful and inventive way.   Amanda’s poems speak of landscape—both city and country, people she knows, people from the imagined past, and narratives drawn from dream.  When writing poetry, she says she’s “participating in a conversation that has gone on for thousands of years.”  In her poem, “Storytelling and the Years After,” Amanda uses images from the story of Icarus to her own end, referencing the original myth with a nod to other poets—Williams, Auden, Rukeyser, Ovid—who have used the myth to tell their own stories.  In Amanda’s poem, the story of Icarus becomes a trope for the idea of story itself:

When words cease—
quivering, restless, immobile, the
volume fallen behind the shelf is the
very one you’ll need.

Go outside. Now is the fertile time.
Stretch out your arms, allow the air to
move through you. Stories will
streak across the sky. Let them fly
toward the sun. Watch them land like
birds on a wire.

Amanda’s article, “Changing Things as They Are: Promoting Social Justice through Encounters with the Arts,” from Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education, v6 n2 p51-57 Fall 2009 can be found at http://tinyurl.com/7lr75xf

Amanda’s poetry has been published in such publications as Chronogram and Quantum Poetry.  Her poetry chapbook, A Banner Year for Apples is published by Post Traumatic Press, P.O. Box 544, Woodstock, NY  12498, dswbike@aol.com.

Her poems, “Rosary Bead,” and “Storyteller and the Years” After can be read on the NYCWP Celebrate Writing site.

Tune in monthly to access highlighted resources and opportunities for teachers and students to use in the classroom and beyond. For ease of use, each title is hyperlinked and key dates are stated in bold font and italicized.

TEACHING RESOURCES

NWP/DIGITAL IS
This collection of resources explores the issues surrounding the use of new technology within the classroom. Specifically, Digital Is uses stories of teachers beginning their journeys of utilizing technology in the classroom as a way to provide framework and support for teachers to answer the questions of where and how to begin.

EDSITEment
Together with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Verizon Foundation and the Thinkfinity Consortium, EDSITEment provides a compilation of highly-rated humanities and history related resources for students, teachers, and parents.  Its website reveals that it is “one of the top 25 websites for 2010 by the America Association of School Librarians and has been accepted into the Smithsonian Institution’s Permanent Research Collection of Information Technology.”

Open Educational Resources (OER)
OER provides users with the opportunity to not only access its resources, but to edit and add to them as well.  Users have free access to download its resources for use in the classroom and/or edit these and re-upload them back to the website for use by all.  OER is a one-stop access point for educational resources, since creators of the site scourer the Internet for educational resources and house them in their databases.

Prezi
A platform that makes classroom presentations more interactive, Prezi also increases student engagement with the information presented.  The website provides users with the opportunity to begin with a basic use of Prezi and then advance to more intricate designs. To use this free resource, educators and students register with a current school email address and provide school name information.  From there users create a profile and begin creating a Prezi presentation.

Teaching the Research Paper
A page among the many resources provided by the English Companion Ning, Teaching the Research Paper is dedicated to the discussion of ideas, strategies, practices, theory and questions around the teaching and learning of the research paper. It is, like the English Companion Ning, a forum for teachers created and sustained through teacher discussion.

World Savvy Global Resources
World Savvy provides extensive teaching resources around global themes including curricula, lesson plans, videos, multimedia presentations and publications. World Savvy invites educators to register for their free Global Educators Network which provides users with monthly updates on the resources available to them.  In addition, the site provides opportunities for high school and middle school students to compete with their knowledge of world issues for scholarships.

STUDENT OPPORTUNITIES

American Youth Leadership Program in Bangladesh
The American Youth Leadership Program (AYLP) is offering a four week exchange in Bangladesh. Thirty students and five educators will get the opportunity to travel to Bangladesh to examine issues of climate change. The application for the 2012-2013 trip opens on February 13th, 2012.

Grants for Educational Travel for High School Students
Council on International Educational Exchange is only one of the organizations that provides scholarships to students who wish to pursue a study-abroad experience.  Compiled by USA Today, this website provides educators suggestions and tools for helping students with the study-abroad process, and the organizations that wish to help those students who need extra support to make studying abroad a reality.

Teen Ink
A long-standing premier magazine for teens that welcomes all writers–fledgling and strong alike–the opportunity to publish their writing in multiple genres, Teen Ink features both online and print access.  Online, students can participate in discussions of self-generated topics, and see their work published in the print magazine.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Annenberg Learner
Sponsored by the Annenberg Foundation, opportunities for professional development are provided through print, video and web media. Participation in a program is offered with a facilitator, through self-study or graduate credit.  The site also offers a distance learning component for institutions and includes a plethora of free resources for use in the classroom categorized by discipline.

Educators Invited to Respond to Common Core State Standards
The National Writing Project provides a summary of NWP’s involvement in the drafting process of the Common Core State Standards as well as a brief overview of Literacy within the Standards. This NWP article urges educators to follow the link provided to read, respond and make suggestions to the Common Core State Standards by April 2, 2012.

—Curated by Tricia Clarke and Taina Torres

photo: TokyoLunch

Each subject area has its set of words that have special significance; for example, in history the words advocate, legislation, resources and economy might be found in most courses. As a way to bring these foundational words to life I’ve had students adopt-a-word using all or part of the following project. After you have done the project once, be sure to save some good examples to use as models for the next time.

ADOPT-A-WORD PROJECT
by Joe Bellacero

Note: Words in bold may be adopted in an English class.

This project is appropriate for single or two-parent families.
Go to the Word Wall Adoption Agency and choose the right word for your new family.
You must do parts A and B below and four (4) of the activities from C to I.
This is your child, be a good parent and help it get along in the world by:

MUST DO
A:    Knowing its qualities

• Spelling
• Pronunciation
• Meaning(s)
• Part(s) of speech
• Etymology (history)
• Relatives (related words, e.g. If your word is “evocative” some of its relatives would be: vocal, vocation, provocative, convocation, advocate, revoke, provoke, invoke)
• Synonyms

B:    Introducing it to other words

• Set Up Play Dates: by finding at least four other words on the Word Wall that have similarities and explain how they are similar in any of the ways listed above
• Get it a Girl/Boyfriend word: by finding adjectives or adverbs that fit with it, or verbs or nouns that complete its thought, or a companion with “and” or a particle/preposition that comes after it, etc.

CHOOSE FOUR

C: Dressing it with four (4) different sentence outfits that complement its personality (meanings)
And bring out its various features, including its inflections,
D: Finding or drawing a portrait of its meaning, preferably with you in the picture (a family portrait),
E: Showing a play date with its four other Word Wall Adopted words by making a story with them,
F: Creating a family tree of its origins and development,
G: Giving it a calligraphy or graffiti make-over for our Word Wall,
H: Putting it in a skit, song, or poem to present to the class,
I: Finding where it likes to hang out—finding it in context in three (3) places.  Name the story, poem, novel, play or essay where you found it as well as the author, then copy out the sentence in which it appears.

We will hear about one word/child a day for the month.

NEXT MONTH

Adopt it a brother or sister and raise it the same way.

photo: Calamity Meg

Greetings Friends and Colleagues,

Happy New Year and welcome to the inaugural issue of the New York City Writing Project’s e-newsletter. As many of you remember, print newsletters have a rich history at the Project—running back to the spring of 1982. But this marks our first electronic newsletter. With it, we are proud to announce our new website and some exciting new ways to keep our community updated.

2012 marks the New York City Writing Project’s 34th year of professional development and support for teachers in NYC schools. Our work continues to thrive, and new sponsored fellowships and initiatives are on the horizon. With full-time consultants currently on-site in 24 sites collaborating with over 450 teachers, our in-service programs will reach over 55,000 students this year. We continue to expand our summer offerings—in addition to our annual Summer Invitational, we will sponsor an advanced summer institute investigating argument in writing as a way of deepening knowledge and expertise in working with the Common Core State Standards. What’s more, a new cohort of fellows in the Elementary Leadership Program is busy building knowledge and strategies for inquiry-based writing in K through 6 classrooms.

To increase the NYCWP’s participation and awareness in global education conversations, we’ve reserved one space in our summer invitational for a teacher from abroad. Themba Langa, a South African curriculum advisor, spent last July with the NYCWP as our first visiting international Fellow, marking the beginning of an effort to sponsor global fellows each summer. During his time with us Mr. Langa built a curriculum for teachers using writing-to-learn methods to promote HIV/AIDS awareness among South African secondary students. Networking and support among the Fellows continues to flourish; from the South Bronx to Soweto, new resources and insights are being shared.

On a more personal yet global note, I spent the holiday break in Nepal visiting schools and conducting workshops for Nepali teachers. It was an amazing opportunity to learn about classroom teaching in Nepal, as well as share some of the NYCWP’s approaches to writing, reading and experiential learning.

It’s our hope that these new forums—the e-newsletter along with the website’s new dynamic content— will provide rich opportunities for us to stay connected in the future. I’d like to thank those whose hard work made this initiative possible: Tricia Clarke, Noah Gordon, Grace Raffaele, Taina Torres and a committed team of teacher consultants at the NYCWP. We welcome suggestions and feedback as we continue to shape these new technologies around the needs of our New York City Writing Project community.

All my best,

Erick Gordon, Director

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National Writing Project’s 2011 Annual Meeting in Chicago

The NWP’s  2011 annual meeting was held at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, on November 17th and 18th. Assembled in conjunction with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) convention each year, the annual meeting is a place to come together and share knowledge across the network. Over 560 members of the NWP community came out to hear updates on funding, grant opportunities, and new initiatives from the National office. In addition to two small group strategy meetings and workshop sessions, participants came together for a luncheon talk featuring Deborah Meier.

Friday sessions included a writing marathon sponsored by the Chicago Area Writing Project and the University of Illinois Writing Project, as well as a working session examining the NWP’s new online spaces, NWP Connect and Digital Is.

“Literacy in the Common Core” Launches in Park City, Utah

Writing Project teams from sites in Colorado, Kentucky and New York (ESWPN— Empire State Writing Project Network) convened in Park City, Utah from July 31st through August 4th to begin to plan curriculum that aligns to the CCSS using the Learning Design Collaborative’s template to develop modules/units. Marcie Wolfe, Joe Bellacero and Diane Giorgi, from NYCWP, joined the team to begin the process of developing teaching modules using the Literacy Design Collaborative system and to build collective knowledge related to understanding and implementing the CCSS.

Module Writing Team, CCSS

The NYCWP Module Writing Team convened at the Annual Meeting on November 17th  and 18th to continue the work begun in Utah. Writing Teams have moved to the drafting of modules/units using the Learning Design Collaborative’s template for curricula which is aligned to the CCSS. Social studies teacher Felisa Brunschwig, and science teacher Pam Meyer, joined NYCWP’s Joe Bellacero, Diane Giorgi and members from seven other NWP sites from across New York State to provide and receive feedback on the draft modules. Further review and preparation for dissemination took place when the team met in Tiburon, California, January 13th – 15th, 2012.

FELLOWSHIPS AND INSTITUTES

NYCWP Elementary Leadership Program

Now in its fourth year, the Elementary Leadership Program supports the growth of teacher-leaders in elementary schools across New York City. Funded by the Rabina Family Foundation, 14 New York City elementary school teachers create inquiry projects to explore writing practice with their students. Starting in November, a new group of Fellows meets once per month at Lehman College with School of Education Early Childhood faculty, Dr. Cecilia Espinosa, and Catlin Preston an elementary teacher from Central Park East and member of ELP’s first cohort.

Satellite Invitational Institute in Brooklyn

Due to the size and range of the NYCWP’s constituency, as well as the always-present demand for additional programming, the NYCWP offers a Satellite Invitational Institute in Brooklyn each spring. The 2012 Satellite began January 20th, and will meet for eight Saturday sessions to read, write and explore classroom writing practices. This year’s 19 Fellows represent middle and high school from four of the five boroughs of New York.

Collaborations in Adult and Continuing Education

In collaboration with the NYCDOE’s Office of Adult and Continuing Education (District 79), and the Institute for Literacy Studies’ Adult Learning Center, NYCWP teacher-consultants are providing professional development services to teachers of Basic Education, English Language Learners and GED classes as well as instructional facilitators, region principals and assistant principals.

Investigating “College-Readiness”

Working with two CUNY-wide programs, the NYCWP will bring high school teachers and college faculty together to examine issues of college readiness in the Bridging the Space program. Partners include At Home in College, a Robin Hood Foundation-funded college transition program and College Now, whose goal is to increase the college enrollment and retention rates of NYC public school students, and ultimately, their college graduation rates.

Celebrating Student Writing at the Nuyorican Poets Café

On May 21, 2011, students from participating NYC Writing Project schools were invited to this end-of-the-year event, reading their poetry and prose on the stage of the legendary Nuyorican Poets Café.  Twenty-two students from ten schools from across the city shared their work–and all of its thoughtfulness, passion, humor and heartbreak–to a standing-room-only audience.  The reading was organized by Alison Koffler-Wise and Diane Giorgi. Musical interludes were provided by music teacher Fred Vasquez and his students from Newtown High School.  The Grand Master of Ceremonies was spoken word and performing artist Christopher “Cannon” Mapp.

NEW WORKSHOPS: The Writing Project Around New York City

Writing that Takes a Stand: Integrating Argumentative Writing Across Content Areas and Language Connections across the Curriculum: On-site teacher consultant Diane Giorgi led multiple workshops to support teachers in their work with CCSS and integrating language and content instruction across disciplines.

Writing from the Core: Argument, Persuasion and the Art of the Essay. Teacher consultants Julie Miele, Alison Koffler-Wise and Susannah Thompson led a workshop series devoted to the argument strand of the CCSS, studying other key strands of writing and reading that reinforce skills to create an argumentative piece.

Building Argument from a World of Text. Facilitated by Susannah Thompson and Alison Koffler-Wise, this two-day workshop at the American Museum of Natural History led teachers through a process of observation, discussion, and varied reading and writing experiences to inspire original ways of using this element of the CCLS.

Writing from the Core: Teaching Narrative, Argumentative, and Informational Writing. This workshop, facilitated by Susannah Thompson, focused on innovative approaches to teaching the major strands of writing featured in the CCLS.

To find out more about workshops in your school, click here.

Awards and Publications

August 2011: The poem, “House and Garden” by Alison Koffler-Wise was awarded the Green Heron Poetry Award by the Upper Delaware Writers’ Collective.

As part of the writing/performing group, the Goat Hill Poets, Alison Koffler-Wise was featured in the November/December issue of Ulster Magazine.

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]]> http://nycwritingproject.org/2012/01/onward-and-upward-in-2012/feed/ 0 http://nycwritingproject.org/2012/01/up-and-coming-opportunities-from-the-nycwp/ http://nycwritingproject.org/2012/01/up-and-coming-opportunities-from-the-nycwp/#comments Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:04:57 +0000 erickgordon http://nycwritingproject.org/?p=685

Summer Fellowships
Stay tuned for information about the NYCWP’s 34th annual Summer Invitational, as well as a Summer Advanced Institute. Applications for all Summer Fellowships will be released by early March.

Summer Programs for Youth
The NYCWP will offer two writing institutes for youth this summer. Details to be released in late February.

Annual Teacher-to-Teacher Conference
June 2nd will mark the 14th annual T2T conference at Lehman College. In addition to over 25 classroom teacher facilitated workshops, NCTE President Elect and critical literacy theorist Ernest Morell will open the day with keynote remarks.

“What is the longest word in English that can be typed just with the left hand?”
“What word contains all of the vowels (including y) in alphabetical order?”
“How do we address correctness issues without being elitist?”

Joe Bellacero, Associate Director, NYCWP
I thought I’d mention that I used to bring wordplay into the classroom. On Mondays I would put a question about a word on the board, and the first person to find an answer would get extra credit on our vocabulary test. If someone found a better answer, they would also get credit.  I’d ask questions like, “What is the longest word in English that can be typed just with the left hand?” the best I could find was “stewardesses.” Or “What word means the opposite of itself—to cling together and to cut apart?”  that real oddity, “cleave.”

Sometimes the kids would come up with one and I could play too, such as “what word in English contains all of the vowels and sometimes y in order (facetious and, sometimes, facetiously).

Helping kids build their vocabularies was something of an obsession for me, wordplay allowed me to make it fairly painless.

What other vocabulary building tricks are out there?

Amanda Gulla, Assistant Professor, English Education in Lehman’s Department of High School Education
Here’s another cute trick: what is the only word whose plural contains none of the same letters as the singular form? (The catch is that this plural form is archaic and hardly ever used any more)

The answer? cow/kine.

Gina Moss, Legacy School for Integrated Studies
What phrase means exactly the same as its opposite?
(fight with/fight against)
One has its origins in Anglo-Saxon, and the other in French.

Grace Raffaele, NYCWP On-site Teacher-consultant
What wonderful words you have all presented here – most being new to me but lots of fun to pronounce and say I now know!

My “favorite word” experience began with my discovering that I love the word for butterfly in Italian, Spanish and French respectively: farfalla, mariposa and papillon—Oh how I love saying them and thinking about how they invoke the butterfly itself – try saying farfalla over and over and not think of the wings of a butterfly – OK, or the pasta shape!

But when I explored my other language heritage and said the word for butterfly in Japanese to my Spanish-speaking students, I was met with a surprise! Choucho (as you may know it from ChoCho-san in the opera Madame Butterfly) means something quite different in Spanish – in fact it is a male body part that my students would not even say in front of me! It feels weird to me not to be able to use this word in Japanese without worrying about any misinterpretations…. but then again the Japanese word does not have the same feel to it in its sound as the latin versions do so I am OK with letting it go! I’ll just find another Japanese word to love – like oshi (delicious) or kaiseki (an artistic multi-course meal experience) or sunomono (a light clear soup)!

Amanda Gulla, Assistant Professor, English Education in Lehman’s Department of High School Education
Just when it seemed that this discussion had come to a logical conclusion, I stumbled upon this word:

hebephrenia: meaning a form of insanity occurring at puberty, also known as disorganized schizophrenia.

The etymology is from Greek hebe (youth) + phren (mind). Earliest documented use: 1883.

Now tell me that the very existence of this word doesn’t provide opportunities to explain at least a few of the things that happen in your classroom on a somewhat regular basis. Don’t thank me, thank the Word a Day website.

Joe Bellacero, Associate Director, NYCWP
You may have seen this before but it doesn’t hurt to look at it again. Perhaps we can come up with our own additions to the dictionary. I’ve included a possibility at the end.

The Washington Post’s Mensa Invitational once again invited readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.

Here are the top five winners:

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus : A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxicaton : Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you  realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation : Coming back to life as a  hillbilly.

5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

Eric Nolan
I’ve recently been referring to Wikipedia as Wackipedia, but that’s not as close to as good as anything on the list.

I feel like it’s in the air . . . the zeitgeist . . . a creativeness with words.  Maybe for the last five years or so in pop culture.  Combining words, changing one or two letters, also texting acronyms, etc.  Everything from “Bennifer” was it? with Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez to “crackberry” to “bromance” to who knows what else.  I wonder if this outburst has any connection to some other or all parts of our lives, the poor economy, the wars overseas, a sense of . . . who knows?

Although puns are still not that funny.

Any thoughts?

Joe Bellacero, Associate Director, NYCWP
I have to agree that it is an exciting time for language, Eric. What I most enjoy seems to be the very thing that upsets so many others–the populist control of it. For many years most people, even many teachers, have seen the “rules” as having come from the mountain and been etched in stone tablets, rather than as a scholarly analysis of what is done in the living language. It drives them crazy to see that the burst of writing that has been enabled by new media works variations on the “rules” and seems to be evolving faster than they can process. They are so worried about what is being lost (and “every gain must have a loss” [line from an old song, "'Til Then"]) that they cannot enjoy what is being gained in efficiency and liveliness.

As I watch people with their newest phone, it is absolutely clear to me why we need “crackberry” in our vocabulary. Suddenly, new language is not just in the hands of teenagers and scholars, you and I get to come up with our own absolutely necessary words and get them into the language as quick as twitter or Facebook.

I will be very sorry if voice recognition apps and programs get us to the point where writing will be taken out of our hands (hmm) and will slow down this creativity again. It might not happen; new technologies can bring unexpected changes. But if it does make it more difficult to create new words or new grammars, I’ll be sorry to see this flowering period pass. (On the other hand, I can already hear those determined to cling to the imaginary past, bemoaning the fact that no one needs to know how to spell anymore because the machine does it for you and chooses the spelling it considers most apt for the context.  I want to tell them, “Don’t worry there will always be something you can know that will allow you to look down your noses at others.”)

Carla Cherry, Teacher, Innovation Diploma Plus HS
“On the other hand, I can already hear those determined to cling to the imaginary past, bemoaning the fact that no one needs to know how to spell anymore because the machine does it for you and chooses the spelling it considers most apt for the context.  I want to tell them, “Don’t worry there will always be something you can know that will allow you to look down your noses at others.”

Interesting discussion.

I wonder though, what to say to people who are concerned about the poor writing skills often seen in our schools and society at large.

How do we help students who struggle to write a cover letter, resume, or college application essay that isn’t full of spelling and grammatical errors? Those mistakes can disqualify them from college admissions or employment opportunities. How do we address that issue without being elitist?

Any thoughts on that?

Dusty Miller, NYC Museum School
Carla, a conundrum, for sure…

Ironically, I think elitism is already embedded in the fast-paced change itself.  Language that is clever catches on quickly, and those most likely to be clever with language already understand its rules and possess the linguistic dexterity, fluidity and fluency needed to turn a phrase or word in an interesting way, and thus become the movers of language.  They’re a fast read. Even if they just understand the property of clever language that enables it to beguile, they’re socially miles ahead of the person who does not.  And so present is either an academic understanding of language that affords pathways into how to bend, play and be clever with it (and therefore also write great cover letters and resumes) or a social (and life) understanding of language as an instrument of seduction – and power.  Ask a rapper.  Understanding how things work allows us to play with the workings.  Picasso and Pollack have both sketched perfectly executed, realistic life figures, but then doubled back to confound the pathway.  I think this is what clever and fast-changing language does.

But people who lack the linguistic ability to see a word or phrase as doing two things at once (“Smore’s” and Johnny Carson’s law firm – Dewey, Cheatham and Howe) are not only locked out of a layer of the common culture, but also probably are locked out of an ability to detect satire (or worse, sarcasm), discern tone or any manner of reading that requires well-honed linguistic skill.  If you don’t get that the coins “Bennifer” and “Brangelina” are, besides being clever blends, also coated with a touch of arsenic intended for the occupants, you’re not reading all the way through.  But how to get individuals who might be struggling with basic comprehension to be able to go there by themselves is a question that points to a social divide, and I’m not sure that some glib language isn’t meant to make sure that divide remains firmly fixed.  Think of the language teenagers use that is meant strictly for the purpose of removing them from detection by the older set, but as this ability of language to define “ins” and “outs” is played out on a more dramatic scale, the social implications become grave.

Joe Bellacero, Associate Director, NYCWP
You hit on one of the real complexities of our work–what exactly constitutes “good writing” and what is our responsibility as educators both to shape the answer and to respond to the popular understanding–especially in these changing times.

Let me posit a situation for us all.

The recent iPhone has a feature where you can dictate a text message and send it without having to spend time training the phone to your voice. As this voice recognition software continues to improve I can foresee first some translating programs which allow you to speak English while it writes Mandarin and then, not too long after that, allows you to speak AAVE or nuyorican while it writes Standard English or even academic English.

Currently, much of the hair-tearing talk I hear about student writing has to do with spelling and grammar. Talk to such people about writing process and the idea that good writing has little to do with those two issues and their whole body turns into one big sneer. But what will be our responsibilities once such technological advances almost remove spelling and grammar as considerations?

Isn’t “good writing” that which effectively communicates what we want it to communicate or even more broadly, effectively does what we want it to do?  If so, then we have to teach accordingly.

To me, if I think of a good piece of academic argument as a hand-crafted table, then spelling, grammar, punctuation, and mechanics are the hammer, saw, screw driver and drill needed to shape and connect the parts, i.e. they are the tools. Two hundred years ago, I would have needed a spokeshave, and adze and a number of specialized planes to take my tree and turn it into a table but now I can buy the boards pre-cut, shaped and planed. Provided I have learned to understand what makes a good and beautiful table, no one cares that I cannot use an adze.

I guess what I’m saying is that we should embrace the fact that our job is being changed by the new context being created through the web and technology. For the time being, of course we need to help our students understand grammar and spelling and code-switching etc. but our most important job as teachers of the language arts is to help those students use all of their native abilities to recognize and be able to build good strong pieces of writing.

Let them play with words, create their own, be more efficient with the ones that are there (You/u) and adopt/adapt a web-aligned grammar. At the same time help them see the whens, whys and hows of using different codes in different situations. The tools are changing but we still need the table.

Photo by Dolescum

This month’s selection from the NYCWP newsletter archive is from the spring 2003 issue. “Blurring Boundaries Between Academic and Personal Writing,” an article by Vanessa Santaga, is particularly timely in light of the current drive to implement the Common Core Standards. In middle and high school classrooms across the country, personal writing is being abandoned in favor of more formal academic writing.  However, we believe, as Vanessa Santaga does, that expressive writing plays a significant role in helping students gain confidence as writers and thinkers. And in fact, skillful writers weave different genres in their work all the time, intertwining the personal with the public, narrative with argument, memoir with formal analysis. Vanessa helps us to remember this.

Enjoy!

Ed Osterman and Diane Giorgi

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from Volume 22, Number 2

BLURRING BOUNDARIES
Writing between personal and academic
Vanessa L. Santaga
Kingsborough Community College

As an undergraduate, Vanessa Santaga sought out teachers who acknowledged the role that personal writing plays in the development of a student’s growth as a critical thinker. She looked for classes in which she could bring her personal experience to her analyses of text. As a teacher, her own students don’t have to look very far for such freedoms. By inviting students’ experiences into the classroom, she blurs the boundaries between the personal and the academic. This is not only an interest of hers in her own classroom, but in her doctoral work in English Education at New York University.

I first became acquainted with the argument that denies the importance of personal experience in academic writing as an undergraduate English major at Dartmouth College. The rift between the personal and the academic was reflected in the course offerings in the department. The highly academic English Department only offered four writing courses: Introduction to Creative Writing, Creative Writing Fiction, Creative Writing Poetry and Creative Writing Non-Fiction. The other courses in the department were literary criticism courses; students were expected to leave their personal experience out of their analyses. Because of the English Department’s position, I searched outside the department for instructors who invited students to make personal connections to texts and in essays. I found several non-fiction writing courses in the Environmental Studies Department that encouraged me to read texts and consider my personal experience when writing response papers.  As I wrote personal narrative pieces in the Environmental Studies courses, I grew as a reader, writer and learner. I solidified and questioned my beliefs and understandings. I changed the way I approached not only writing, but creative and critical thinking as well.

I met with conflict when I visited the Vice Chair of the English Department and requested that my Environmental Studies courses be applied to my English major. The Vice Chair aligned himself with those in academia who believe that the personal and the academic exist as a strict dichotomy. I urged him to see the value of my personal connections to the texts and how these connections, when articulated in a paper, honed my critical thinking and writing skills. But I had no luck. The Vice Chair was not ready to acknowledge personal experience as anything more than something that should continue to be compartmentalized away from academia.

Perhaps the reason why the Vice Chair wanted to keep students’ personal experiences separate from the work they completed in the English Department is because personal experience does not exist in a neat box. Personal experience is a variable that challenges “expert” interpretations. Certainly, reading Shakespeare and analyzing what is being said according to one professor’s expert interpretation leaves less room for surprises than analyzing Shakespeare in the contexts proposed by 25 individual students. Professors definitely have it easier if personal experience is not part of students’ analyses of texts. However, it is this challenge and conflict of experience that engages students and professors alike in an ongoing effort to rethink and reshape what they know and how they know it.

Because my experience with the Vice Chair and my present experience as a teacher exist along a continuum that is constantly engaged in a dialogue, my own freshman composition and basic reading and writing classrooms provide students with opportunities to write about their experiences (the Vice Chair did not get the last laugh). I begin every course I teach with an essay assignment that asks students to share something meaningful about themselves through an autobiographical narrative. We read a variety of non-fiction narratives before and during the writing process so that students become familiar with authors who have conveyed meaning by simply sharing significant stories from their lives. In sharing their stories, these authors, Maya Angelou, Joan Didion and John Edgar Wideman among them, teach their readers lessons and make their readers think; it is a subtle art, not an explicit, didactic formula.

For my students, sharing stories in the context of a classroom, a place in which they have typically engaged in the more mundane academic writing exercises (writing summaries and five paragraph theme essays, for example), presents an interesting and sometimes puzzling juxtaposition. To many students, stories of personal experience are to be told out of the classroom. Students share stories to convey meaning to their parents about how they are doing in school, or to convey meaning to their friends about how their dates have been going, or to convey meaning to their boyfriends/girlfriends about why they are in a bad mood. All of these everyday stories they tell, some more meaningful than others, exist outside of the confines of academia. Because students are generally well-practiced in storytelling in their outside-the-classroom realms and they are not as practiced in conveying meaning in a more academic format, creating a bridge between the two meaning-making activities can often be an effective way to help students use what they know to learn what they are on the brink of understanding.

Before these new understandings can be achieved, the stories the students write and how they work at conveying meaning within them must become part of their consciousness. In my classroom, this process takes place as students begin to deconstruct their own and others’ stories to see how meaning is created. A student may, for example, notice how he focused on the two-hour period of his life when his parents told him they were getting divorced to represent the experience of divorce as a whole. Another student may notice how she never wrote “I was excited,” but instead described the setting with words that convey excitement. Yet another student may notice how his classmate’s story did not contain “what I learned from this situation was…” because the lesson naturally unfolded as the story approached its ending. All of this noticing, done within the classroom with my support, takes what may be perceived by skeptics as simply “personal” and raises it to a level of reflection that characterizes academia. Yet, the advantage of using students’ stories rather than other material as the springboard is that students are already familiar with the content because it comes from an organic place––their experience.

At the point at which students seem to have mastered an understanding of the qualities of their autobiographical narratives that make them work––focus, descriptive details, logical sequencing of events, appropriate language (not necessarily “standard” English), evocativeness––we transition to a discussion of how to write essays that use not only their experiences, but also texts we have read, to convey meaning. In that discussion, we ask the question, “How do texts affect our understandings of our own and others’ lives?” As we consider the question, students begin to see that texts can enrich and expand their understandings of their experiences and therefore, provide them with another layer of meaning to explore within their essays.

To many students, stories of personal experience are to be told out of the classroom…All of these everyday stories they tell, some more meaningful than others, exist outside of the confines of academia.

We move from personal narrative to what I like to call “text-based” essays. I prefer “text-based” to “analytical” or “academic,” as personal narrative may not be explicitly analytical, but I would argue, if written well, is implicitly analytical.

… students begin to see that texts can enrich and expand their understandings of their experiences and therefore, provide them with another layer of meaning to explore within their essays.

“Text-based” acknowledges that a text plays a significant role in the essay, but it does not preclude experience,
if students choose to incorporate it as well. As a bridge activity, we discuss how the qualities of their effective autobiographical narratives transfer or do not transfer when writing about texts. Students generally come to a consensus that certain qualities transfer directly: there is one event that serves as the focus for their autobiographical narratives, and there will be one aspect of the text that will serve as the focus for their text-based essays; there are descriptive details to show the reader the meaning of their autobiographical narratives, and there will be descriptions and quotes from the text to show the reader meaning in their text-based essays; a logical sequencing of events helps their autobiographical narratives flow, making them easy to follow, and a logical sequencing of paragraphs, revealing their analyses of the text(s), will be selected for their text-based essays; they use appropriate, often informal, language for their  autobiographical narratives, and they will use appropriate, although more formal, language for their text-based essays. The qualities of their essays that transfer smoothly, although crucial to their understanding of effective essay writing, are not as discussion-inspiring as those that do not transfer as smoothly. The class often engages in a thought-provoking discussion as to why meaning may have to be conveyed in a more explicit way in their text-based essays than in their autobiographical narratives. Part of that discussion includes the necessity of opening and closing paragraphs to help guide the reader in their text-based essays in ways that unfolded more naturally in their autobiographical narratives.

By the end of the discussion, which generally occurs over two days and includes the use of student-generated and published writing, students have a conscious understanding of how the strategies they have employed while writing their autobiographical narratives apply to writing text-based essays. As an example of the positive results that come from encouraging students to bridge the personal and academic, I will share the story of one student, Anna^1, who used her own experience making a decision about her pregnancy to further her understanding of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”  Anna not only wrote a comparison between herself and the narrator in Frost’s poem, but also addressed the differences between the two. In the process, she raised some critical questions regarding her own experience as it fits into the greater context of decision-making. Anna wrote:

Like Robert Frost, I also came across a rough decision in my life because of the actions I chose to perform. “Should I keep this baby?” haunted me for three months, day in and day out. All types of questions and issues arose in my head: How would I take care of this baby? Is he [the father] going to be there like he says he is? What would my parents/friends think? How can I start college? What kind of future would we have? Is it wrong not to have the baby? You can imagine the type of agony I was going through at this time.

I too looked at both possibilities and like Frost says, “I looked down one as far as I could.” I looked into my future, at least twenty years down the road to see where I would be if I decided to keep the baby and where I would be if I decided not to keep the baby. Both choices did have pros and cons to them, but I still couldn’t make up my mind. I detached myself from the world and just made believe I was the only one with the decision to make, because I thought it was only going to affect me in the long run; I still believe that. Sometimes I just wished that everything would go away including me. I wished that I didn’t have to make a decision that it would just go away and stop haunting me. I thought to myself, “What did I do to deserve this?” I took it as a punishment.

Anna’s decision-making process takes the narrator’s decision-making process in Frost’s poem and elevates it to a new level of complexity. In earlier paragraphs in her essay, Anna analyzes the narrator’s decision-making process and although her analysis is solid, Frost does not provide enough detail in the poem for her to really assess the process in any great depth. Her own decision-making process, however, provides her with that opportunity. Anna has the details of her own situation, details that she does not have about the narrator. The specific decision to be made, for example, is not provided in Frost’s poem; Anna uses her own specific decision to expand her analysis where Frost simply leaves her wondering.

Anna’s essay is not an isolated case. There are many students whose critical thinking and writing skills flourish as they move from what is familiar to what is new and uncharted. The distance between students’ lives and academia will continue to narrow for students only if classroom practice invites students’ experiences into the classroom. The work that students are capable of generating when they move fluidly between their personal experiences and their academic pursuits is insightful and original.  The personal gives birth to original thought in that it is the one aspect of a student’s repertoire of skills and knowledge in which the student is the expert. As teachers, we must consider how classroom practice can continue to blur the boundaries between the personal and the academic so that students have the opportunity to learn to become meaning-makers in any context.

¹ A pseudonym has been used to protect the student’s anonymity