On August 26th, and 27th, Renee Watson, author, actress, and teaching artist for Community Word Project, led a a series of workshops with the theme, Talking Back to the World: Empowering Students to Define Themselves through Writing and Visual Art.
High points of the training were a dramatization of The Emotional Bus (have you ridden on it before?) and a revision lesson using music from the Fugees. The WITS orientation is designed to inspire and prepare WITS writers for the new school year.
InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit has a lot to be proud of. This week they welcome back from San Francisco six student poets, where their team placed fourth at Brave New Voices, the national youth slam competition.
“This is not just a slam. These are words for a better tomorrow,” slam team member Justin Rogers proclaimed. The WITS Alliance congratulates Justin Rogers, Devin Magee, Joseph Verge, Ariana Washington, Breeana Blackmon and Andrew Barnhill. You guys give us hope!
Community Word Mural by 7th graders at PS/MS 279, Bronx
Each Writers in the Schools (WITS) program is unique. Community Word Project in New York City is a great example. All of the WITS programs do culminating events to celebrate what students have learned over the past year. Community Word is the only group to transalate the groups writing into art. Here is one example of a community mural. It was written and created by 7th grade students at PS/MS 279 in the Bronx. Community Word is led by the Founding Director, Michele Kotler.
Image via Wikipedia
Submissions for the 2011 Bechtel Prize are due on June 30. This year the Bechtel Prize will be judged by Patricia Hampl. Here is more information from the Teachers & Writers site:
Since 2004, Teachers & Writers Collaborative (T&W) has honored the author of an exemplary essay on literary arts education with the annual Bechtel Prize. Submissions for the award address important issues in creative writing education and/or literary studies.
For more information, click here.
Ten students from InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit performed for the Obamas at the White House last night, alongside reknown poets such as Elizabeth Alexander, Billy Collins, and Rita Dove. InsideOut is a founding member of the WITS Alliance. Click here and here for more information.
The Wick Poetry Center (Kent State University) has created Speak Peace, a travelling exhibit of children’s art and writing about the Vietnam War. The exhibit was recently featured in Washington, D.C., at the annual AWP Conference. You can see a gallery of videos promoting the project here.
Georgia Popoff, an independent teaching artist in central New York, has something to celebrate, a new publication. Her book, Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community, written in collaboration with Quraysh Ali Lansana, has just been released. Georgia was a panelist in one of the WITS Alliance panels at the 2011 AWP Conference in Washington DC last week. You can read more about the book publication and launch schedule here.
Photo by Yvonne Feece
The Writers in the Schools (WITS) Alliance hosted its first national conference August 26 – 28 in downtown Houston, convening 15 literary arts groups to discuss how to turn America’s students into outstanding creative writers. The meeting combined intensive training sessions and professional development for 15 nonprofits representing each region of the U.S. Participants included administrators from Texas, New York, Michigan, Florida, Washington State, Indiana, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and Ohio. The conference provided participants with the necessary tools for running a successful WITS-type program.
WITS flew in experts Michele Kotler and Keith Kamisnski, from New York’s Community Word Project (CWP) to demonstrate the Teaching Path model for curriculum development. Together with WITS Associate Director, Long Chu, the team led lessons on engaging student work and enforcing effective teaching strategies for under-served children.
On the last day of the program, WITS welcomed 79 writers to the 2010-2011 roster for an interactive orientation focusing on best practices in education and tips on planning a successful school year. Kotler’s inspirational keynote address was the highlight of the morning followed by a community poem exercise that writers performed as a group – the largest collaborative piece ever recorded by CWP. Each attendee walked away with a comprehensive lesson plan to use in their classrooms. Says Josephine Jones of Colorado Humanities Center for the Book, “The Conclave renewed my passion for the work and prepared me with more tools for positive change than I can hope to use as I begin to assume responsibility for training the teaching writers in our program this year. I’m honored to be part of the Alliance.”
“Is there anything in the world sadder
than a train standing in the rain?”
–Pablo Neruda
I’ve always loved Pablo Neruda’s poems. Ripe-apple-tender and wild-eyed, they’ve carried me from classroom to classroom for more than a decade as I’ve worked as a teaching artist in the New York Public Schools through Teachers & Writers Collaborative. One of my favorite lessons asks students to do nothing more than question the world. “Ask a question that can’t be answered,” I tell them. “Anything,” I say. The students stare at me or gently rock or twirl hair around the tips of their fingers, but bit by bit—with the help of teachers and paraprofessionals and communication devices and speech therapists—their questions emerge.
Why don’t apples grow on pear trees?
Why doesn’t America have Founding Mothers?
Do broken hearts break things?
Why is night?
What is different? Why is different different?
I’ve been working with these same students for the past three springs, all of whom are middle school-aged and considered to be on the “lower end” of the autistic spectrum, and each time I return to them after a long city winter, they disarm me. To be quite honest, it almost always feels like we’re starting from the very beginning. I hold up a poem on a piece of paper, and week after week, I ask them, “How do we know this is a poem?” And week after week, I wait. Today, lesson five, the room promised as much silence as ever, but then James spoke. “Space?” he said, more of a question than an answer. And I clapped and jumped, and Yes, James, yes, we know it’s a poem because there’s SPACE!
Eighteen months ago I gave birth to my daughter, Eva, and immediately she carved out this frighteningly tender spot in my heart. It’s strange because mornings, before I go teach, I do the same sort of exercises with her that I do to warm up my students. And this is your nose, and these are your toes, and where o where are those pretty elbows? The fact that my students are so much older than Eva—and so trapped in their pubescent early teenage bodies and in their very different working minds—is sometimes difficult for me to take.
Motherhood has cast my work with these students in a special, harsher light. If I think about it too hard—and sometimes I do because, I believe, as writers and artists and compassionate beings we must—this discrepancy threatens to disable me. It’s such a reminder of how unfair the world is, of how unequal we all are, of how many questions there are that fly so wildly around refusing to be pinned down by any single answer.
It’s at those times that I have to remind myself to see the world a bit more like Neruda does—as unanswerable and surreal and magical, as a train standing in rain—knowing that, sometime soon, either the rain will stop or the train will pull away, and I will be left standing oh-so-near the tracks, weighed down only by poetry and love.
Nicole Callihan works with Teachers and Writers Collaborative, a sister organization in New York City. Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, Salt Hill, Washington Square, and New York Quarterly. She was a finalist for the Iowa Review’s Award for Literary Nonfiction and was named as Notable Reading for Best American Non-required Reading. She teaches at New York University and in schools and hospitals in New York City.
InsideOut Founder Terry Blackhawk, City Wide Poet Lena Cintron, and First Lady Michelle Obama at the Coming Up Taller Award Ceremony 2009
InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a member of the WITS Alliance headquartered in Detroit, has been nationally recognized as one of 15 youth arts and humanities programs to receive the prestigious 2009 Coming Up Taller Award. They received the award for City Wide Poets, an after school writing and performance program. For more information, click here.
Fort Kent WITS Writers and their students gather for an Earth Celebration. (April 2009)
The most recent issue of the Aroostook Review, an online literary journal published the University of Maine at Fort Kent, features a number poems by WITS students from Maine. The University of Maine at Fort Kent’s English Program offers a WITS training course which offers both theoretical and experiential components for undergraduate and graduate students. The WITS program in Fort Kent was founded by Geraldine Cannon Becker. For more information about WITS at UMFK, click here.
“Alley Cat” is a poem by a six year old Maine student:
Alley Cat
It’s just an old alley cat,
a bag of old bones.
It has no proud tiger stripes.
It can’t even reach its bowl.
It hasn’t a star on its head.
Though, we shall call you pretty…
“Pretty, come in.”
by Joanna, age 6
As the new school year looms ahead in the not-so-distant future, it might be a good moment to restock your library of teaching materials. Teachers & Writers Collaborative has published more than 80 books to support WITS teaching. Favorite resources for writers who teach include:
Poetry Everywhere: Teaching Poetry Writing in School and in the Community, by Jack Collom and Sheryl Noethe, contains 60 writing exercises and more than 450 example poems by children, teachers, and poets. It also discusses how to integrate poetry writing into the English class, sound and rhythm, using great poems as models, traditional poetic forms, poetry units, investing and adapting exercises, revision, publishing, and other essential topics.
The Adventures of Dr. Alphabet: 104 Unusual Ways to Write Poetry in the Classroom and in the Community, by Dave Morice, features innovative ideas for engaging students, including poetry mobiles, poetry robots, postage stamp poems, rolodex poems, chopstick quatrains, and other inventive exercises.
Old Faithful: 18 Writers Present Their Favorite Writing Assignments, edited by Christopher Edgar and Ron Padgett. In this book, 18 writers describe their single best writing assignment: the one that never fails to inspire students to write autobiographical pieces, fiction, poetry, and plays.
In addition to books, T&W publishes the quarterly Teachers & Writers magazine, winner of 10 Educational PressAwards for Excellence. The magazine covers contemporary issues and innovations in creative writing education, and engages writers, educators, and students in a conversation on the nature of creativity and the imagination.
To see the full catalog of books offered by T&W, to read a sample article from Teachers & Writers, or to order books or a subscription, go to the T&W website. You can also place orders via phone (toll-free) at 1-888-BOOKS-TW.
