The administrative end of things is not my favorite part of being CWP director. I would much rather be teaching or writing. But someone has to do the administrative work.
Likewise, when I write this column I enjoy writing about teaching and about students and teachers. I don’t usually enjoy writing about things like policy. However, I have to mention this week that President Obama has made proposals that would radically alter the way NWP sites are funded, and should his anjuran go through, the national infrastructure for the NWP would lose funding, and all 210 individual sites would have to complete with other educational entities for federal block grant funds.
Sites could wind up competing against each other and/or against other educational entities, like their own departments of higher education or host universities. For instance, because our site is housed in the English Department of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, we could hypothetically find ourselves competing against the Neag School of Education for funds.
In truth, I think our site would do all right; the English Department, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the university in general would be supportive of co-sponsoring grant proposals. Ironically, in fact, we could win a grant that gives us greater funding than we currently receive. However, but we’d still lose the support of the NWP, and we’d see many of the smaller, less well-supported sites around the country disappear.
So this makes this year’s Spring Meeting in DC especially important. We not only need to persuade our senators and representatives to re-authorize the funding for the NWP, we need to persuade them to re-write the legislation so that direct funding is restored. Emails to senators and representatives would help the cause.
New England Writing Projects Annual Meeting
On a brighter note, plans are coming together for the New England Writing Projects Annual Meeting, which we are hosting this year on April 9-10, here in Storrs at the Nathan Hale Inn. All eleven NWP sites in New England are sending representatives. (There were ten New England sites when we submitted the mini-grant proposal, but since then the satellite site at the University of Southern Maine has been made official).
We had hoped for around forty participants, but we are going to see closer to sixty. Buzzards Bay at UMass-Dartmouth is sending ten participants, and even the two Maine sites are each sending one Teacher-Consultant. Including Jane Cook and myself, around ten TCs from our site will be participating in at least one day of the meeting.
Jane and I will be giving a presentation on Friday about the work we have done to promote and use technology at the CWP. We’ve given some version of this presentation the last two years at the New England Association of Teachers of English (NEATE) annual meeting.
On Saturday we’re really fortunate to have a presentation from Paul Oh of the NWP and Andrea Zellner of the Red Cedar Writing Project at Michigan State University. Paul and Andrea are making a presentation on social networks and teaching. Andrea will be joining us via videoconference from Michigan.
On Friday night we’ll be collaborating with the Creative Writing Program to hold an Open Mic in the CLAS Building. The plan is to have students from Denise Abercrombie’s creative writing classes at EO Smith High School join undergraduate and graduate students from UConn, and kindergarten through college teachers from all the participating sites read their poetry at the event.
Stacy DeKeyser to Speak at Recognition Night
Currently the office has been abuzz with Sharlene, Shawna, and Ben organizing the submissions to Connecticut Student Writers. Last year submissions dipped slightly below the one thousand mark, but this year we were able to climb back above one thousand. Reading Day is next weekend, the twenty-seventh, and soon the magazine will be in production.
One big change this year is that we will not be holding the Recognition Night in Jorgensen Auditorium. Jorgensen will be closing in early May, right after selesai exams, for renovations. Basically, the building needs to be made compliant with current fire code regulations. So we will be holding the event in the von der Mehden Recital Hall, which is a much smaller venue but that should be just big enough for us. Von der Mehden holds 470 people, and last year we had 430 people RSVP for Recognition Night, so we should just make it! Lizzie Searing and Taking Care of Tummies will still be catering the event, so good food can be expected, but the lobby of von der Mehden is much smaller than that of Jorgensen, so we’re hoping for good weather that will allow folks to spill out into the open air.
This year’s keynote speaker will be young adult novelist Stacy DeKeyser. Stacy’s novel Jump the Cracks has received many recent accolades and good reviews. The book received the Connecticut Press Club Award for Best New YA Novel, and was just nominated for a Truman Readers Award, which is presented by the Missouri Association of School Librarians, and interestingly is decided upon by the votes of middle school readers. Stacy ran workshops for the CWP last year at the Student and Teacher Writing Conference.
Barry Lane Coming to the Summer Institute
My last piece of good news for this week is to announce that the CWP will be bringing author Barry Lane to the summer institute this July 8 (tentatively). We used Barry’s Discovering the Writer Within two years ago and are very excited to have him come work with the teachers this coming summer. This was important to me because I feel I put so much emphasis on secondary and college instruction—that being where my experience is—and I really wanted to do something more for the elementary school teachers this year.
By the way, we are still accepting recommendations for the Summer Institute. Email me the name and contact information of any teachers you think qualified!
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