7.1 Writing Across the Community

Writing Across the Community: Changing Writing Realities in a University-Run Summer Writing Program for High School Youth - Hannah Ashley, West Chester University

"Liberal politics plus an MFA does not equal a good urban school teacher." This was the provisional judgment offered by one of the methodical Temple University graduate student presenters at "Writing Across the Community: Changing Writing Realities in a University-Run Summer Writing Program for High School Youth" at CCCC 2008.

The innovative program, called the Temple Writing Academy, which the four scholar-staffers presented, was designed to be a bridge between university and high school literacies through a four-week summer program which integrated creative and critical writing. Last summer it served fifty-five students from the five zip codes surrounding Temple, where the median income is about $20,000. In an area where one-quarter of the population is under eighteen, program staff had found that there were only three summer programs for high school youth, none which intended to aid those youth specifically in writing. So the program was breaking much-needed new ground.

It broke new ground in other ways. While the program based its design on previous approaches (827 Valencia, for example), the Temple Writing Academy particularly aimed to connect creative, out-of-school genres and more critical, academic approaches to writing. Rebekah Buchanan, who directed and assessed the program, noted that the small class sizes (five to fifteen students) and a focus on "ideas-that part of the college community...not standardized tests" was effective, and seemed to result in meaningful interactions between many of the graduate student instructors and the youth, as well as improved writing.

Classes were taught in areas such as journalism, slam poetry, blogging, sports writing, hip-hop, and the academic essay. Students had access to computers, as well the University Writing Center and its tutors, and the program culminated in a local publication. The underlying principle was to combine critical consciousness and expressive modes, to use writing to "explore cultural systems in which those young writers were embedded."

The challenges the presenters noted were two-fold: making the connections between in- and out-of-school literacies, and bridging the gap some instructors experienced between their preconceived ideas of the students and the realities they faced in the classroom. C. Bernard Hall, the Assistant Director, noted that in just the space of a few weeks, some of the graduate student teachers started voicing "fatalistic attitudes" in staff meetings, making comments such as "I'm just trying to get through the day" and "just being on a college campus" should be enough for these students. He noted that, typically, the MFA students needed more preparation for what they were going to face, and his conjecture was that their graduate focus on writing as an art may have left them (and here he admitted to generalizing from his small sample of teachers) shocked at realities of teaching. The program intends to focus more on preparation and support in subsequent years so that the instructors would not go into "survival mode." On the other end of the spectrum, teachers from Temple's Urban Education program tended toward a different kind of equally familiar fatalism: "Am I just setting these kids up for failure? There's no place for poems on the SAT."

As many of us are who initiate new ideas, the presenters were hard on themselves and their instructors. I found myself wondering if they may have benefited from the idea that "teacher talk" is an outlet, a way to let off steam, while still acknowledging the need to hire and prepare well those teachers who do join their program. As a member of the audience, I was impressed with the program as an exciting model for a bridge for basic writers, especially from urban areas where a college campus may be down the block but another world away.