When I started teaching in 1968 there was really no professional support at all for NYC teachers. I spent many years searching for a professional community, one where I could share my practice and learn from others.  I found it in 1987 when I attended a graduate level course in the teaching of writing offered by my district through the New York City Writing Project and Lehman College. I was an experienced teacher and wasn’t sure what I could possibly learn but three free credits sounded pretty good. Yet, as so many others have said before me in so many different forums, this connected community changed my life, both professionally and personally. I became active at my site, attended Saturday meetings and eventually designed and taught graduate courses and workshops. I became on on-site teacher consultant, the associate director of middle schools and spent the last seven years until my retirement this year as the director of the NYC site.  

I want to talk about the NWP’s Urban Sites Network because it has been the most important and eye-opening piece of my work over the years.  The Urban Sites Network was the first of NWP’s national programs and it impacts teaching and learning across the country. The network became a prototype for all the other national programs offered by the NWP in support to sites. It began in the late 80’s when a number of urban writing project sites received a grant to foster teacher research and inquiry in urban classrooms. Up until that time there was little in the professional journals that reflected what was happening in these classrooms. Urban voices needed to be heard and the way to do that was to do research and to write. I was one of the teachers who benefited from that grant. I spent two summers working with colleagues from urban schools across the country learning from each other and sharing the research we had been doing during the school year. I have always known that teaching is a political act and that what we teach and how we teach it is important. For too many years the voices of urban students and teachers many of whom were teachers of color had not been part of the conversation and had in fact been silenced. The NWP helped to change that. Those were not easy summers. Race talk is hard and never comfortable. Feelings get hurt and people feel silenced yet through careful facilitation and respect for the knowledge people bring to the table differences can become generative and learning does happen. What I learned during those summers was powerful and has helped me as an educator and as human being living in a diverse and imperfect world. I was fortunate to have had the opportunity to be a part of this work and am deeply saddened and angry that NWP funding has not been renewed.