We thought this week would never come! Gail and I talked about starting a Writing Project site several times, but we could probably date the conception of UIWP from my visit to Sarah McCarthey’s talk about her research in the fall of 2006. I was advised that, if I wanted to talk to Sarah, I should show up where she was! Ironically after she talked about problems she saw with the way writing is usually taught in Illinois, someone in the audience–I think her husband Mark Dressman–mentioned the National Writing Project. So I had a chance to talk about it to everyone there. From there we had a team. Sarah, Gail, Chip Bruce, and I began to meet with the goal of finding the campus support to apply to be a new NWP site.
We didn’t search long for a teacher to join us! As soon as Gail suggested Scott, we had a team. Scott was our contact with the realities of the Champaign and Urbana schools, including tuition waivers and consent decrees.
I drove to Nashville for the 2006 Annual Meeting of the NWP and learned more than my brain could hold about writing projects. During the spring semester of 2007, we met regularly and began to find support on campus. We met lots of enthusiasm for the project but, of course, turning that appreciation into a financial commitment took extra effort from everyone. A budget started to come together and we divided up the work of writing the narrative.
Over the summer of 2007 several of us visited other sites of the National Writing Project, including Illinois State Writing Project, Indianapolis Writing Project, and Bluegrass Writing Project. We constantly revised the parts of the grant application until we were ready to send it off to the Office of Grants and Sponsored Projects, the last step before submission. Then after a flurry of parking tickets, original signatures, and trips to the south, south campus, the application headed to California just in time for the deadline.
Finally in late October, Gail emailed that Richard Sterling was trying to call her, and we all knew the good news was coming–we were actually going to have a new site. She and I finalized our plans for the NWP Annual Meeting in New York in November where we again heard more than we could absorb but caught the Writing Project virus. We were sure the model was valuable and important to the teachers in Champaign and Urbana. But, could we do it?
In cold, cold January the NWP team made a site visit as they do to all new sites. Tom Fox from UC-Chico and Rebecca Kaminski from Clemson were assigned to steer us toward a successful Summer Institute. Richard Sterling joined them, as he had promised Gail that he would, and we traveled to the Provost and the deans of LAS and Education to thank them for their support. Richard’s British accent made us an impressive group. We also treated several local school administrators to lunch and explained more about the project. The next day we spent several hours with Rebecca and Tom talking about the specifics of our recruitment, Summer Institute, and budget.
The next step was to find 16 wonderful local teachers who would spend a month of their summer vacation with us. We knew the Writing Project would catch on, but with a new program unfamiliar in the area, we thought we would struggle to find the interest in the first year. To our delight we received 25 applications for the 16 places. We interviewed all the applicants in groups, enjoying stimulating discussions about writing and teaching with each group. We narrowed the list down to 16, only by promising the others they could apply next year.
Our Summer Institute plans began to come together. We had decided early that digital literacy would be a focus of our Institute because of the expertise we could offer and because of the interest it would generate among teachers and their students. It fit the NWP model well because making videos or websites is a writing process. And if the best teachers of writing are writers themselves, then the best teachers of multimodal literacies are people who have experimented and agonized over their own digital projects. We borrowed laptops and cameras for everyone and began to assemble a schedule.
Now we are launched. Teachers are writing and filming and posting. They look like they’re having a good time and I know they like the food. Maybe this is going to work!
