Elyse Eidman-Aadahl made her inaugural address at the National Writing Project Annual Meeting on Thursday. A perfect fit to be the latest director of NWP, she has been poised at the center from the early days, espousing the NWP dream of a world of writers. Her perspective made the whole trip worthwhile.
Elyse captured our 40-year history as “Founders and Scalers,” those who established the important traditions of teacher-as-writer and teachers as key to reform, followed by those who brought the NWP to public notice, gathering data, churning out evidence, setting the goal of an NWP site within fifty miles of every teacher. The Scalers took up the “counter-narrative” to teacher-bashing, broadcasting the news of “lives changed” and schools revived.
And that’s where the National Writing Project is today: an amplified voice for writing and teachers as the focus of transformation in education. Data-cruncher Mark St. John compared the NWP to forty-year-olds with long memories and big dreams. He estimated (from actual data) 80,000 teachers have come through summer institutes, 3-4 million are teachers impacted annually by NWP teachers, and 200 million over the forty-year span. Move over McDonalds!
I found the NWP in 1986 in Boston with Joe Check and Peter Golden. I remember sitting in a classroom in June at the University of Massachusetts, when Joe said during self-introductions, “We haven’t heard from . . .” and I knew my years of standing on the sidelines were over. I began resurrecting my childhood in memoirs and researching the I-Search Paper, and getting a rush from everything I wrote. I still have the final reflection I wrote for the Summer Institute in my files. It was called “Late-Bloomer,” because I had already been flailing around as a teacher for eleven years before I stumbled on the Boston Writing Project. But that was twenty-eight years ago during the Founding stage of the NWP.
During the “Scaling” period, I was just starting as a teacher educator at Eastern Michigan University and not quite aware of the sudden influx of federal funding and proliferation of teacher consultants, sharing their practices. At the Eastern Michigan Writing Project we developed some strong leaders in the decade between 1997 and 2007, but we were not spreading our practices much beyond our own schools. We started summer writing camps and Family Literacy workshops during that period, but we could not claim changes in schools, just individuals.
Our outreach became more focused after 2007 and even more so after the loss of federal funding in 2011. We were in individual schools several times a year and even started to consider long-term strategies. Real partnerships that involved long term planning actually grew with the SEED (“Supporting Effective Educator Development”) funding after 2011. In the last two years we have added instructional coaching to our repertoire, and now we anticipate lasting change in the districts we work in. We have begun to “scale” in our own communities.
Today we are contemplating a Teacher Quality grant proposal in a high school, bigger dreams in a bigger school. It looks very daunting, but it is not a challenge a Writing Project site should shirk from. We are now in the “high needs schools” business. We are investing less in high- functioning schools. There’s no turning back.
This brings me back to the celebration of the 40-year Writing Project. What I get from writing is perspective. Everyone gives you perspective: the media, the government, the strident social media. They hurl perspectives from every angle. In writing I get to withdraw and consider it all. I have my sooth-sayers and prognosticators, but I have my private space right here, where I sort it all out. Without writing I am just an echo-chamber for cacophony.
That is the National Writing Project’s legacy to me: a place to cultivate a perspective, a place to stop the whirl of events and ask “What’s happening?” At this moment, the NWP is what’s happening, the scaling, the reforming, the blessed community. I am grateful for it.