Collaborating, Writing, and Listening in the GKCWP

Betty Jo taught English at a suburban high school outside Kansas City. She had a life-size poster of George Bush in her classroom. She is a proud Republican and Baptist.

Paul teaches at Math at urban high school in Kansas City. He is a published writer and an openly gay atheist.

Kate is a preschool teacher at a childcare center.

Jim is a Democrat, retired after a full career as a teacher and then an Assessment Coordinator.

Mary is a poet and retired African-American teacher, able to recount the tumultuous desegregation efforts in the city.

Shawn was a long-time football coach, teaches English and writes poetry.

Every time I start to write about the National Writing Project’s loss of federal funding, I am flooded with the faces of the teachers I’ve been honored to work with as the director of the Greater Kansas City Writing Project. Not many people choose to work intimately with others who espouse disparate ideologies, but my greatest growth as a person and as a teacher has come from working among such a diverse group of committed professionals.

As classroom teachers, we arrive to work everyday surrounded by students from diverse backgrounds. Our students differ racially, religiously, economically, geographically, ethnically, and individually yet they must collaborate and participate in conversations with each other daily. They learn how to do this – how to listen to each other and share their own thinking –  in our classrooms. But in order to be effective at facilitating this kind of interaction, teachers must experience this kind of interaction themselves. We must be able to participate in conversations with a group of individuals who represent diverse perspectives.  The GKCWP has been a place for teachers to learn from each other. Republican or Democrat; religious or atheist; pre-school teachers to college professors;  music, math, and science teachers: we’ve all chosen to sit around the same table and work toward consensus on issues that help us be better teachers to our students.

Writing is thinking out loud. And to be a teacher – any kind of teacher – is to be a writing teacher.  Yet few teachers feel equipped to teach writing; they can assign writing, but they’re not sure how to teach it. To be successful at teaching writing, we need to have experiences as writers; we need to understand intimately what it takes to write well. The GKCWP has been a place for teachers to see themselves as writers, to experience the writing process and reflect on how their experiences will inform their teaching.

The GKCWP teaches us how to listen to other people.  When the room is filled with teachers from all different backgrounds and the subject is how reach all students, we have to begin by listening to each other. I hope those with the power to restore federal funding to the NWP will listen to the diverse voices of teachers of writing and hear what we are saying: the NWP works.