The NorCal Writing Project at Work

Peter Kittle, NCWP Director

I began my teaching career in 1987, when I was hired to teach English at Kelso High School in Kelso, WA. I had a number of wonderful colleagues who did what they could to support me as I entered the complex world of public school teaching. Still, as almost all educators learn very quickly, teaching is a challenging career made all the more difficult by the isolation we often experience, especially as new teachers. I felt this isolation keenly. My colleagues did what they could to mentor me, but they, too, were teaching 150+ students each day, and had the additional normal obligations to family and friends as well. There was little institutional structure to help new teachers like me adjust to the profession. What I remember quite keenly was missing the kind of collegial professional community I had built with my fellow preservice teachers prior to leaving my teacher-education program at Oregon State University. 

When I left Kelso High to begin a doctoral program in English in 1992, I had in mind ending up as an English Education professor at a state university somewhere, working to connect local teachers to the university in some respect. I wanted to be part of something that would provide the kind of community I missed when I was in the classroom myself, but I didn't know what such work might look like or how I could make it happen. As things played out, I found myself some years later landing an assistant professorship in English Education at Chico State University. One of my new senior colleagues, Tom Fox, kept suggesting to me that I get involved with the Northern California Writing Project, which he directed. I demurred for some time, unsure of what the Writing Project was about. But I decided to take Tom up on his offer of a place in the Summer Institute in 2000. 

From that time forward, I have been part of the precise kind of community I so wanted when I was teaching high school. The Writing Project's basic tenets--supporting teachers as they conduct inquiry into their own classroom practices; positioning teachers as leaders in their schools and communities; providing a welcoming professional home--jibed perfectly with my own beliefs about how teachers (including myself, of course) can best thrive. I am proud to be an 11-year member of the Northern California Writing Project. 

Practically all of my work that has gone public (via conference presentations or publications) has been the result of work with and through the Writing Project. Collaborations with my friend and Writing Project colleague Rochelle Ramay, who chairs the English Department at Corning Union High School, have wound up in at least four journal articles and book chapters. Multimodal composition became a point of inquiry for me as a result of a National Writing Project network-wide summer program, and resulted in another book chapter. The same summer program introduced me to colleagues like Chippewa River Writing Project Director Troy Hicks, with whom I later co-authored an article in Pedagogy on collaborative online writing. Earlier this month I was able to co-present with Andrea Zellner of the Red Cedar Writing Project at the Digital Media and Learning conference on an idea we're trying to figure out--we're calling it "distributed identities." I have progressed from assistant to associate to full professor on the strength of work done via the Writing Project. The networking of teachers from across the US that the NWP enables goes far above and beyond my deepest hopes for finding, creating, and contributing to a professional community for teachers. 

Every local Writing Project site in the US connects practicing teachers to a university-affiliated professional community, which in itself is a wonderful thing. That each site is likewise connected to every other site through the NWP network is what gives the Writing Project both depth and breadth of knowledge and expertise--what former NWP Executive Director Richard Sterling and NWP Deputy Director Judy Buchanan call "scaling up and scaling down." Of course, like any other enterprise, the Writing Project requires funding to succeed, and for the past two decades, roughly, baseline funding for NWP has come from the federal government. Broad, bipartisan support has characterized the NWP's reception in Washington, but in the recent passage of the federal budget's continuing resolution all funding for the NWP was cut. Targeted as an "earmark"--a term that demonizes "pork" funding of specific legislators' home-district interests--the NWP and other education programs like Reading Is Fundamental were removed from the budget. The use of this epithet is heartbreakingly ironic in this situation; funding for a program that benefits the entire nation, as does the NWP, is the definitive anti-earmark. 

My wish--and my reason for writing this--is to add my voice to others affiliated with the NWP who are participating in the #blog4nwp event. I hope that the key stakeholders in education, be they representatives, senators, cabinet members, or other policy makers, will pay heed to the voices raised in support of the NWP. The money needed to support the NWP for an entire year amounts to less than what the US spends every 3 hours on the war in Afghanistan. Surely we can afford that.