GKCWP reflection
The summer of 2007, I was finally able to schedule in the long-anticipated session of the Summer Institute for the Greater Kansas City Writing Project. At that point I had taught for 34 years, everything from eighth grade art to graduate level methods courses. In the field of English, I had taught British Literature, College Level Composition, A.P. Comp./Lit., and just about every other course in the catalogue. I had been urged to participate in the SI for a number of years, but due to teaching summer school and courses at the Missouri Scholars Academy, the state's governor's institute, I was unable to work it in. Then, the magic summer of 2007, I was selected for the SI. I quickly came to realize how important the GKCWP is for personal and professional growth, and wished that I had been able to participate far earlier, as it impacted my teaching and writing in many ways.
I have participated in professional development for most of my long career, usually as an instructor/facilitator. I can say without qualification that the SI is the most profound professional development available. In those four intensely satisfying weeks, I forged friendships that last to today, developed a presentation on the graphic narrative which I've delivered at the university level several times since, and wrote compositions that I return to frequently. I participated in Socratic sessions of intense questioning of methods and society's prejudices, and stretched myself in writing unusual modes for me – a published author of curriculum - as in the area of personal reflection and poetry. I also gained so much from the demonstrations that other diverse teachers presented and from the daily bouts of pre-writing, editing and conversing about writing. I still use the strategies and writing samples I gained from that summer. I am not timid to share my writing with my students, and we both benefit from my brutal editing of my own work. As a professional educator, in the summer of 2007, I grew as a teacher, thinker and writer in ways I could have never predicted. Most of all, I grew in confidence. I became a much better teacher.
The most important outcome from the summer of 2007, however, is the immediate transference of strategies and techniques to my students. Presently, I am once again teaching an ACCP course through Rockhurst University, which I have not done since 2001. The difference between those two courses, my expectations, and my teaching of writing is remarkable. I am the same dedicated teacher with high expectations for my high school seniors, but the methods I use to help them reach their potential have changed in measurable and positive ways. I dedicate much time to exploring ideas in writing, to examining text in text renderings, and to reflecting often on meta-cognition, which are all strategies I gained from the SI. Consequently, the writing my students do is much more relevant, significant and powerful, and far less artificial. The conversations my students hold in various writers’ workshops are meaningful and productive. We all take writing and its efficacy very seriously.
The tragedy of even contemplating cutting the National Writing Project and all of its components is that other students will not have the opportunities of my flourishing writers. Students will be forced to write in programmatic and predictable manners merely to perform well on standardized tests. Student writing will lose all authenticity and significance, and student authors will become pedantic drudges or shadows of Bartleby the Scrivener. Students will lose ownership of the most powerful outcome from writing and meaningful expression - their sense of self. I know that I gained a heightened sense of who I am as a writer and person from that summer of 2007; it is only just that my students have that same experience.
Vicki M. Jones
Liberty High School
200 Blue Jay Drive
Liberty, Missouri 64068
