Recently, an odd-shaped package arrived in the mail. It wasn’t even from Amazon, and it was a lot more inviting than the assault of fund-raising letters that fill my mailbox these days. Pity the poor mail carriers. It turned out to be a framed copy of an extraordinary poem by a high school student who is working with a writer from a program called Writers in the Schools (WITS) in Houston. Much more about that in a minute. I wanted to share that poem with you, but the young author was reluctant to broadcast her work so widely. I’ll just say that her piece is a beautifully crafted tribute to her Indian grandmother, including her prodigious kitchen exploits. She wrote it. She owns it and she has a right to determine where it gets read.
That package, which also included two attractively produced anthologies of writing by both students and their mentors, sent me down a trail of reminiscences about how much of my professional life has been devoted to writing by students and their teachers. WITS was a program that I had a hand in starting more than forty years ago, along with a gifted teacher, writer and friend Phillip Lopate. We had worked together years earlier in a program called Teachers and Writers Collaborative (TWC) in New York City, which is where this story rightly begins.
In the mid-60s, Herb Kohl, a teacher, writer and visionary to whom I owe so much of my appreciation for the creativity that lies within all children, gathered a group of writers who were committed to moving classrooms beyond the prevailing writing instruction that was mired in the land of book reports and five paragraph essays. In his classic book, 36 Children, Herb recounted how he encouraged his students in a Harlem classroom to write from their own experience and imagination. Soon TWC was dispatching writers to classrooms around the city to encourage kids to write the way real writers do. The writers kept journals about their experiences and experiments, which were not universally successful, but they were producing work that could draw readers beyond that audience of one – the teacher – who was obligated to read and grade it. I will never forget visiting a classroom where a novelist was introducing himself to the students. “I’m here to teach you how to lie,” he declared. From that moment, he had them in his back pocket.
The 60s was a decade of creativity and liberation on many fronts beyond writing. Many of the institutions and organizations that emerged during that period are long gone but TWC has shown great adaptability and continues to inspire students and teachers heading into its seventh decade. I was, by my count, the fourth director of the program. During my three-year tenure, my colleagues and I built a publishing arm that spread the work beyond the small number of NYC classrooms and created a national audience for TWC’s unique approach to student writing. The program has grown and strengthened in ways I couldn’t have imagined and is currently in the hands of leadership that has never lost sight of TWC’s original vision.
On a personal note, TWC taught me how exciting a classroom can be when you tap into the unique power of students’ creativity. I wanted to be part of that, so I became a classroom teacher at grade levels from elementary school to middle school to high school. Writing was always at the heart of my instruction – plays, poetry, memoirs, short stories which found their way into anthologies like the ones I found in my mailbox a few weeks back. We also experimented with unique forms of non-fiction writing, most notably the I-Search paper, research that invited the writer’s voice in to replace the cold first person of most writing in this genre.
We moved to Houston in 1982, where Rosellen taught at the University of Houston. One of her colleagues was Phillip Lopate who had been among the original writers at TWC in New York. Together we conspired to recreate the original program in a new setting, using the students in UofH’s graduate writing program as staff for the newly created WITS. Unlike the 60s, the decade of the 80s had receded into a shell of accountability and testing, so the task now was to convince principals and other administrators that allowing creativity in student writing would ultimately translate into better test scores, even though that was not our primary objective. Once again, the program has developed strong legs thanks to inspired and dedicated leadership and has become a resource for similar programs which have emerged around the country.
There’s one other piece to my story of how much of my career as an educator has been about writing. Once I became a teacher, I realized that as inspiring as our writers were, there would never be enough of them to really reach large numbers of classrooms. In addition, we had to engage the teachers themselves who needed to introduce this more energizing kind of writing we were advocating for. We were not the first to come to this realization. The National Writing Project, a grassroots teacher development organization, believed that teachers needed to become writers themselves to be effective missionaries for the cause to their students.
With a huge helping hand from Rice University, we created The School Writing Project. Teachers from high schools all over the city met weekly to write together, to read about the teaching of writing and to share their accounts of what the writing work looked like in their classrooms. They also visited my classroom to observe my work as a writing teacher, with all its bumps and warts.
Meeting at the end of a long and often taxing school day was challenging. I just wanted to go home, and the participating teachers did too. But we all left the workshop energized, inspired and armed with fresh ideas for our students. Many of the teachers felt isolated and unsupported in their home schools. They testified that the Writing Project kept them from folding their tents and leaving the profession.
Unfortunately, the School Writing Project didn’t have the staying power of TWC and WITS. For a few years after we left Houston for Chicago, I traveled back regularly to keep the project alive. However, its DNA survived in all the work that I did here in Chicago, from training literacy coordinators, to directing a charter school and to helping create the Urban Teacher Education Program at the University of Chicago. The are so many forces now pushing against the spirit of teaching embodied by all the writing work. When the pendulum swings back, as it inevitably will, I hope there will be room in the AI world-to-come for student voices to sing boldly in their own voices.
I’m really proud of this work and the way so much of it has endured in unfriendly times. We have a dear friend who has had an impressive professional life. As he descends into dementia, it’s sad to see that he remembers little of it and has been heard to say regretfully that he has accomplished so little. I want to hang on to the pride I feel in this work for as long as I can. It stands as a counterweight to the thoughts that overtake me at times that I haven’t done enough and in spite of its assorted successes what I’ve done could have/should have been so much better.
