But I can’t help seeing the “white woman saving the African girl but really saving herself” trope through it. In this story Sarah from London almost saves Little Bee. Yet she remains selfish in her refusal or inability to give up a lover who clearly doesn’t share her commitment to Bee. By the end of the book we are not sure whether she will return to Lawrence. However, she has made the strong and risky decision to leave her magazine and write a book about Nigeria, and we have to hope that will happen.

Little Bee, on the other hand, is a strong and wise character. After witnessing horrible atrocities in her home village culminating in a ghastly scene on a beach where she meets Sarah and Andrew, she makes her way to England. She is held in a detention center for two years and constantly fears that “the men” will come for her. Her adoption of the English language is impressive and gives the book some of its finest moments. Likewise her astute perspective on British culture. She frequently imagines describing England to her friends in the village and their bewildered, incredulous reactions. She works magic with Sarah’s son Charlie, calming his fears when his mother seems incapable. Charlie, by the way, wears his Batman outfit throughout the book and is treated lovingly by the author whose own son is also Batman.

Ask996 on enotes.com describes Breakthroughs as” full of essays by teachers who have experienced incredible growth in both themselves and their students in the writing classroom.” Some of them directly reference their Summer Institute experiences and conversations with other teachers that inspired them to rethink their teaching in general. In other cases, they were frustrated and desperate with a classroom dilemma. Reading and listening in the Summer Institute made them think about their practice and review their classroom strategies. The articles describe improvements they made that motivated their students.

The essays are also good examples of articles written from demonstrations. They could serve as models for our teachers to publish their demonstrations as articles for teacher journals or newsletters.

Whatever the discipline, level, or experience of the author, each article shows a reflective professional finding a breakthrough by talking to or reading other teachers and scholars during a Writing Project Summer Institute. The collection underscores the value of the professional development that the Writing Project offers.

“Through analytic accounts of classroom life, I have aimed to capture the inevitable interplay between the official classroom community, with its values and practices, and the unofficial one generated by children. This interplay can be both beneficial and challenging for all concerned: official literacy practices can generate and become a resource for unofficial childhood practices; and, at least potentially, those unofficial practices may inform and even transform official possibilities.”

Some teachers don’t even acknowledge that there is an unofficial community, to their peril! On the other hand, should we simply acknowledge the unofficial or should we appropriate it and make it part of the official curriculum? Is that even possible?

Looking back at my blog, I realize I started a series—a story about each of our Summer Institutes. So now I need to add the 2010 sequel. This summer, our third, has fallen into place much more easily than the last 2 Sis. The same teachers make up our leadership team and they have the same jobs—reading, writing, demonstrations, and technology. Each of them organized a set of activities for the SI and the activities fell into almost the same schedule as last year.

The room locations were another story! Back in the winter rooms in the English Building were restricted in anticipation of the construction work being done this summer, but we were able to get several good rooms. The reality turned out to be more complicated than that.  Even if you have a reservation, you might not be able to get down the hall for that room. And a reservation is only for the room, not quiet or breathable air or wi-fi. We’ve been so lucky to find rooms in the Undergraduate Library, even if we have to move between them during the day. In fact, the UGL is turning out to be a great location because of all the ways we can spread out to read or write.

Of course, we have another group of wonderful teachers in the Summer Institute. Reading their blogs and seeing their videos has been astonishing. They have so much to say during discussions and seem to enjoy learning from each other. They are especially tech-savvy. Maybe we should expect each group to know more about videos and blogs as all of us become more comfortable with the technology.

This summer we start our first writing camp for students. About 12 high schoolers are registered and they will be led by 3 of our teacher-leaders from past summers. We had hoped to have a camp for elementary ages too, but dates, location, and enrollment proved impossible this year. We know that the high school camp will be fabulous so recruitment should be easy next time.

We hope that our continuity programs can take off this year. We’re planning teacher inquiry groups for a start. Another idea is a Saturday morning mini-conference where our teacher-leaders present their demos and other teachers pay a small fee to attend. We could also continue reading or writing groups during the school year.

These are all big plans compared to our small beginnings in 2008, but they seem quite reasonable with the amazing creativity and enthusiasm of the teachers we have!

Mike Rose wrote Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievement of America’s Underprepared about his own schooling which I consider the most useful description of life for a working class student ever written. Some of his own experiences show up in this book too—his need for remedial math help when he took grad school statistics, for instance. But most of this book relies on anecdotes about his students to illustrate his faith—and his disappointment—in American schools.

Why School? incorporates various articles that Rose has written over the years as a professor in the Graduate School of Education at UCLA. There is much criticism here, but there is also much hope.  I noticed right away that, for each new topic, Rose begins with positive aspects. No Child Left Behind, for instance, shines a light on the performance of poor children and children of color who have been underserved or even ignored in past educational efforts. However, the “accountability mechanism” (45) of the law disregards what we know about students and testing. In another chapter he applauds the instinct of business people to try to “improve American education and create opportunity for young people” (53) while decrying their dismissal of teacher competence and “elevation of systems thinking.”

Rose draws on other research he’s done to explain the extraordinary skills and knowledge required for various blue-collar jobs such as hairdressing and waiting tables. He does this to illustrate that we underestimate what students will need in the working world if they don’t go to college. He also touches on a characteristic of these jobs that I consider even more important: “reductive and limited ways of thinking about intelligence” (83) leads to a management style that restricts workers’ freedom and possibilities of growth.  He cites a study by Glynda Hull of assemblers of circuit boards. Although the management insisted their workers needed literacy skills, they assigned only basic literacy tasks such as reading labels. So the workers had no reason to learn or use more advanced skills. I couldn’t help but relate this story to the way teachers’ professional competence is so often doubted by policy makers.

Another section I found interesting was about standards, the current term for behavioral objectives. “Standards that are applied fairly facilitate learning and show students that their teachers believe in their ability to meet academic expectations” (102). Standards for student performance must be explained to the student and consistent across levels, Rose claims.  In developing them, we need to think about “the broader questions of the purpose of teaching a particular subject” (108) and the histories of the students in the class.  Often, however, standards are rigidly set and rigidly enforced. Rose quotes John Dewey: “’the teacher should be occupied not with subject matter in itself but in its interaction with the pupils’ present needs and capabilities’” (114).

Rose obviously values teachers and teaching in this book, but I wished for more support for the role of teachers in an age of accountability. Although their resources may have dwindled and their creativity may be limited, teachers are still the front line, the people with the most influence on each child’s experience in school. The last chapters of Why School? raise the level of hope in the book. Rose explains how the language of criticism of public schools—such as the editor who wrote “We all agree that American public schools are a joke”—shuts down any attempt at improvement. Rose has written extensively about successful schools, students, and teachers across the country, particularly in Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America. He claims we need to examine and celebrate what is working  more than we focus on deficiencies and failures.

Greetings! Today we start the second Summer Institute of the Writing Project.  Here’s an important lesson we’ve learned over the last year: more help is wonderful. The 4 teachers from last summer’s Institute who have been our leadership team have worked so hard. As a result all the work we did last year has been spread out over more people and planning has been a breeze compared to our first summer.

Here’s the reason that lesson worked so well: the NWP model for a summer institute was a scaffold on which we could hang all our plans. Everyone involved in planning this year understood and believed the model.  We all knew that each teacher would do a demonstration and what that meant. We understood book clubs and individual writing. Each teacher could work on her/his assigned area with confidence because the same area worked the same way last year.

That doesn’t mean we made no  changes. One problem last year that we had to improve on was the way teachers were overwhelmed by the technology. This year we started with the final product at the end of the institute and worked backwards to the specific programs they needed to use in order to reach that goal.  It turns out that we could eliminate several programs that caused great confusion last year. And we could focus more instruction time on the programs that would get everyone started instead of giving them choices they couldn’t interpret.

The teachers who are attending this summer are wonderful, as we knew they would be. What an exciting group! Five hours into our second summer institute, we feel very successful!

https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/elmorley/cookie%20video.mov?uniq=-w4qk6y

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!