Kim Masterson teaches at Salem High School in Salem, MA. She graduated from Bread Loaf’s Asheville campus in 2007, where she worked for three years as a Director’s Assistant. This summer, Kim will be working at the Vermont campus in the same capacity. Kim credits Professor Tilly Warnock’s Bread Loaf course, “Rewriting a Life: Teaching Revision as a Life Skill, ” as helping her to find the stance she describes in “I Live Here: A Reflective Artifact Project.” Kim’s students’ eloquent comments about the project are captured in two videos at the end of this article.

Ariella, a student in my Honors IV English class, mounted the only picture she owned of her birth mother in the bottom corner of a white piece of paper and typed the words, “so close yet so far” at the top.  She told us that she loved her mother, even though Ariella didn’t know her, and that looking at the picture made her feel closer to the woman who gave her up shortly after she was born. Ariella shared this story with us in November, two months after the school year began and four months after I drafted “I Live Here: A Reflective Artifact Project.”

In part, the idea was a product of the short time I spent in a PhD program studying ritual and secret revealing in popular American culture. The assignment asks my seniors to select a different artifact every month, from some point in their lives, and to reflect on that physical object visually and through language. Revealing secrets is never mentioned. Although I thought the project was creative, Ariella made me realize that the grace, compassion, and generosity with which my students would interpret my directions would far exceed any expectations I held. Often meticulously and lovingly completed, the students’ visual presentations masked painful stories that lay beneath the artifacts.

At the outset, I knew that the containment of the project would be important to help my students feel safe in revealing whatever they desired, so as a policy, we agreed to ask no questions during presentations. Almost a year after beginning the project, Edward taught me that the ritual provided the freedom and the safety for my seniors to express not only what they desired, but also what they felt they needed. Edward rarely came to class. When he was eight, his mother’s boyfriend murdered her in front of his sister. Edward tattooed his arms with his mother’s name, her birth and death dates, roses, an angel, and a cross.  He told the class, “The tattoos are a way to always have her with me, have her by my side.” He spoke about her months before her killer was retried on a technicality the man discovered after years of studying his case in jail. Edward wrote “I Live Here” in response to the newspaper articles about the murder and then showed us his tattoos. He said they served as both his artifact and his written reflection, a permanent marker of his loss, his pain, and his memory of his mother.

This moment was one of the most difficult in my room. The students were angry for Edward and wanted to speak out, but they remembered we did not deconstruct or analyze another person’s experience or object. Instead, we gave Edward the space he needed to voice his feelings by keeping our stuff to ourselves. Once he finished talking, Edward sat down, I thanked him for sharing his experience, and we continued  with the rest of the activities for the day. When reflecting about how the project changed his relationships with his classmates at end of the year, Edward told me, “It was good to know it was more than just the friendship I had with them. They’re basically…my family.” We allowed him to say what he wanted and then to leave it – without interjection.

Some of my students feel unable to speak openly about their experiences in the classroom, but I have built into the assignment different venues for expression. In my second year working with the project, Sophie was one of those students who would talk about her artifact with the two or three people sitting near her, but never with the larger group. She, at four, lost her mother to cancer. During her year in my room, she reflected about her mother almost every month. Sophie’s work included journal entries written by her when she was seven or eight years old, photographs of her mom, and lists that her father created of the people who formed a new safety net for Sophie, for her older sisters, and for him. Even though Sophie did not present in class, she let me hang up her work each month outside of my room.

Sophie also wanted to present her project with twelve of her classmates to the School Committee – where members of a select group, at the request of the Committee, share their work as a way to remind the members whom they are serving and why. She told me it was important for her to speak about her mom. She needed the act of giving voice to her mother’s death to work through and to release the stories she carried for years. When we practiced for the meeting in my classroom, her nerve failed. She cried and left.  She couldn’t catch her breath, and she couldn’t come back into the room until the other students found her and hugged her.

At the meeting, Sophie again walked out, but we had worked out a plan that afternoon. Jake, who often played the tough guy, would read the journal entries while Sophie stood next to him. Reading Sophie’s work out loud softened Jake’s attitude. To speak for her, he had to be completely present, he had to help her carry and convey her story. Jake felt the weight and the importance of his actions that day in a way I alone could not have taught him. The day after the School Committee meeting, Sophie completed her last I Live Here project, and wrote, “I felt like I had no one. Well, yesterday I found out I have everyone. I cried. A lot. It was sad. But then I realized these people do care…they’ve been here for me all along.”

When I told the class that my husband would be coming to the school at the end of the year to create a video about the project and my students, Sophie expressed her desire to be a part of it. We talked about her reasons for trying again. We also talked about what it means to cry, but to stay in the moment, and to speak through those tears. In the video, Sophie did cry, but she also told her story, and in doing so, shared the memory of her mother with us. Sophie told me that the support she received from others helped her to find the confidence and peace to talk about her mom without running away. She knew we were there with her, and for the first time, she permitted others to help her carry the memory and the death of her mother.

Each month when I hang up new projects in the hallway, groups of students pause to read them with a kind of thoughtful silence expected at an art gallery. Reading the work in the hallway was how my students learned about Alvin. On most days he completed his work, but kept entirely to himself. Halfway through the year, he turned in a photo of his family mounted on a red piece of construction paper. He glued white paper over the shape of his body and wrote about how he felt disconnected and invisible at home. Alvin did not want to speak about the photo in class, but he allowed me to hang his work up in the hallway. He, too, wanted to take part in the video because, alone in the room with my husband, he thought he could find the words he lost in front of his peers.

More than with any other project, students expressed surprise about Alvin’s story once they saw it. Brion, who grew up with Alvin, told me he spent time at Alvin’s house with Alvin’s parents. Brion said he never knew that Alvin felt so isolated. Brion’s word choice about Alvin’s feelings mattered. He heard Alvin’s story without judging his feelings and without analyzing the behavior of his parents or his understanding of his home life. As in Brion’s experience with Alvin, the move away from judgment to close listening created the space for many of my students to become aware of the lives of others and, in turn, their own lives, just as they were.

The last phase of the assignment asks every senior I teach to select one of their own projects to display at an event I organize in town. Each student writes a sentence or two about the project and about his or her post high school plans. In addition to family members, students invite two teachers with handwritten notes. The teachers rarely decline. At the exhibition, I meet parents who never attended parent-teacher conferences, who never responded to an email. Friends of the students I teach stay for the evening, witnessing the stories of people with whom they grew up, people whom they thought they knew. My seniors’ confidence and compassion, based on mutual respect and a shared understanding of the stories each person carries, electrify the air.

Because of the response of my students and the community, some of my colleagues have asked to replicate the assignment in their classrooms. The request feels complicated to me. The project is incredibly personal, and each of my related actions and responses to students is exacting. In forming my own theoretical stance as a teacher, I’ve spent years working through my own stories and thinking about the nature of revealing. The power results from my ability to turn over the assignment completely to my students because I already mindfully completed the work in my life. My hope is to inspire interested teachers to develop an approach to writing projects that feels right to them, and that may embody the same kind of compassion, respect, and honesty.

By writing and thinking about themselves in a way that felt truthful, and in an environment that felt safe, my students improved as writers. All of our seniors are required to write a Senior Thesis, which is a literary analysis. Because of their work with the “I Live Here: A Reflective Artifact Project,” they were more willing to trust me and to trust others as they explored their analytical voices. My students’ peer editing became more detailed, their academic conversations about writing became more direct, and their ability to explore challenging ideas in texts and challenging writing styles became more nuanced. Understanding the complexity of feelings opened them up to understanding the complexity of language and the importance of writing in many genres.

The students’ remarkable growth affirms my belief that when writers are deeply engaged and believe their readers are to be trusted, they draw on linguistic resources that aren’t available with less personally significant assignments. As a community of writers, we built trust by listening carefully, by caring enough to give each other the space to share and to contain hard stories, and by staying in the moment with each other, even when staying felt uncomfortable.

I wrote “I Live Here: A Reflective Artifact Project,” but the assignment always belonged to my students, from the minute I typed the first word of the directions on the page. The work they produce and their willingness to openly communicate deeply personal stories continues to astonish and to humble me. One of my seniors described the experience best when her friend wanted to present, but initially failed to find the words. She looked her friend right in the eye, touched her arm and said, loudly enough for the class to hear, “Don’t worry, girl. There ain’t no strangers here.” That’s the lesson, exactly.

Watch the “I Live Here: A Reflective Artifact Project” videos, produced by Scott Masterson at Old Harbor Productions:

I LIVE HERE 2011

I LIVE HERE 2012

Jineyda Tapia speaks of the genesis of Teach Lawrence, an outgrowth of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network and Andover Bread Loaf partnership.

TEACH LAWRENCE:

An initiative organized and led by members of the Lawence Bread Loaf Teacher Network, Andover Bread Loaf, and young people and community advocates who are powerful forces for education change.

Goals:

• Achieving equity for underserved students;
• Engaging youth who are talented, capable, and eager to serve as agents of change in their community and schools.

Connections: Teach Lawrence, Lawrence BLTN, ABL, and BLTN

Public school teachers from Haiti; New Orleans; Lawrence, Massachusetts; New York, New York; and Columbia, South Carolina drove to Bread Loaf from Phillips Academy, Andover MA, to Ripton, Vermont, to celebrate the 25th annniversary of the Andover Bread Loaf Writing Workshop, an outreach program of Phillips Academy and the Bread Loaf Teacher Network. The July 2012 ABL/BLTN meeting began in the Blue Parlor at the Bread Loaf Inn, where Emily Bartels and Django Paris welcomed the group to Bread Loaf and several faculty members spoke about their Bread Loaf courses. Later that afternoon, about 50 members of the Bread Loaf community and ABL visitors met for a reception, music, and lots of talk. In the Barn that evening, the Bread Loaf community heard about ABL activities that are happening in U.S. urban sites, internationally, and at various Bread Loaf campuses.

The spotlight was on Teach Lawrence, a program that is a dramatic alternative to the “turnaround” approaches widely used in urban settings. What follows are a few statements about Teach Lawrence’s principles and practices.

Teach Lawrence: Transforming Education, Transforming a City

What if we could mentor a generation of students and train them to become teachers in order to lift our city up? That’s the vision of Teach Lawrence, a program that focuses on developing new teachers from Lawrence, Massachusetts, and supporting those who are committed to teaching here. The greatest resource for turning Lawrence around lies within the community itself. Our goal is to develop youth leaders, support and sustain them as they go on to attend college and graduate school, and encourage them come back to Lawrence to lead their schools and their community. Together we can transform our schools and our city.

The Power of Youth Voice

Thirteen thousand students attend public schools in Lawrence; yet they have no say in discussions about the future of education in the city. Andover Bread Loaf (ABL) and the Lawrence Bread Loaf Teacher Network’s (LBLTN) approach to education—democratic and profoundly student centered—starts by giving youth in Lawrence the opportunity and ability to express themselves. Combine self-expression with a focus on social justice and improving education in the city, and youth flourish and shine, eager to take on leadership roles. We’ve already seen the success of this approach as graduates of Bread Loaf programs are now returning to Lawrence as teachers, community organizers, and leaders of nonprofit organizations. Andover Bread Loaf is creating Teach Lawrence to expand upon and accelerate that process.

A Transformation Pipeline

Teach Lawrence is run by ABL and the Lawrence BLTN (LBLTN), a 25-year-old network of teachers, youth and youth organizers, parents, community organizations, educational, and cultural institutions. Since its founding in 1987, ABL and LBLTN have reached tens of thousands of young people through our writing workshops and student programs. Hundreds of teachers have participated in Andover Bread Loaf professional development programs, and many of its graduates have gone on to teach in the Lawrence Public Schools and elsewhere.

Scaffolding for Life—and Leadership

A multi-generational approach to mentoring lies at the heart of the ABL philosophy, and will be central to Teach Lawrence. Youth mentors are called “Writing Leaders” in ABL programs.

Kindergarten through grade 4
Young Lawrence students participate in workshops on writing, art, math, and science. The students are mentored by Writing Leaders and teachers of all ages—middle school, high school, college, and adult—demonstrating that education is a collaborative venture.

Middle School Junior Writing Leaders
Teacher training begins with middle school students who work with younger students. Middle School students also have the opportunity to run programs and conferences for their peers.

High School Writing Leaders
Cross-age tutoring is key to the ABL approach to teaching, learning, and leading. By training high school-aged students to teach writing to their younger peers, Andover Bread Loaf enables them to be true collaborators in their own education. High school students are actively encouraged to consider college and career, including teaching.

School retention
Throughout their schooling, Lawrence students are receiving mentoring support from their peers and teachers. This regular exposure to role models, including former students who’ve graduated and returned to Lawrence to teach and lead, serves as a powerful force for school retention. By sharing and experiencing the success of their peers who’ve returned to “Teach Lawrence,” Lawrence students are motivated to replicate that success themselves.

College Writing Leaders
College students from Lawrence continue to receive mentoring and support from the LBLTN even while they are attending college. (In fact, mentoring is especially important at this stage given the loneliness and isolation that students from high poverty, minority districts often experience when leaving home). College students are encouraged to return to Lawrence regularly to reflect upon and talk with peers and mentors about their education. During the summer college students participate in and run LBLTN programs.

Graduate level
Fellowships are available to support Lawrence students who wish to pursue teaching as a profession. Students are encouraged to attend summer graduate programs that have a philosophical approach similar to that of ABL. Such programs offer an additional advantage in that they allow teachers to begin their careers and work towards a graduate degree simultaneously, putting into practice the ideas and methods that they’re learning.

Teach Lawrence: A Force for Change and Leadership

In its 25 years, ABL has seen the powerful transformation that can result when youth are empowered to teach and lead. Our efforts and their impact are limited only by the size of our budget. Our summer programs for students are filled to capacity year after year, and demand for our graduate fellowships far outstrips our ability to provide them. The programming upon which Teach Lawrence is based already exists—much of it is already operation. We are working on securing additional funding to enable ABL to vastly expand the number of students reached, teachers trained and leaders produced, thus transforming our schools and our city in a way that no other approach to education reform can do.

For more on Andover Bread Loaf’s partnership with the Bread Loaf Teacher Network, visit  Andover Bread Loaf’s website at  http://www.andover.edu/breadloaf or e-mail Lou Bernieri. Photos from the 25th anniversary event are available here. 

In 2011, BLSE awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree to Jim in recognition of his distinguished service and innovative leadership as former director of the Bread Loaf School of English.

Photo: Jim Maddox (right) chats with Emily Bartels and Jonathan Strong on the porch of the Bread Loaf Inn. 

A grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations plus support from Bread Loaf and Write to Change are making it possible, with the help of all past and present BLTN members, to prepare a list of BLTN scholarship, references, and resources. Rachel Joslyn, a Bread Loaf student from New Hampshire who is an experienced editor and bibliographer, worked last summer in Vermont to collect and publish almost a hundred entries of print publications by and about members of the BLTN; Rachel is continuing her work on this challenging, long-term project. The bibliography is searchable from the Middlebury website (via the link on the top menu of this page). You may also do a more detailed search on the Zotero page at https://www.zotero.org/groups/bltn_bibliography/items. Send items (print and digital) that should be included to Rachel’s BreadNet address ( Rachel_Joslyn@breadnet.middlebury.edu ), copied to Dixie Goswami and Tom McKenna.

Some of the entries include links to articles, chapters, books, stories, and lessons that will soon be accessible and searchable on the Internet. These wide-ranging publications, drawn from 20 years, are the strongest possible evidence of BLTN’s contributions to knowledge about teacher-centered literacy and literature networks in times of rapid change.

Here’s a sample of what you’ll find in this bibliography under construction:

Scott Christian (BL’ 94). Exchanging Lives: Middle School Writers Online. National Council of Teachers of English. 1997.  Foreword by Andrea Lunsford.  One of the first studies of an interactive literature-based collaborative project, The Anne Frank Conference, carried out on BreadNet, with Tom McKenna (AK), Mary Burnham (VT), Peggy Turner (MS), Sondra Porter (AK), Phil Sittnick (NM), Helena Fagan (AK), Les Fortier (MS), and Patricia Parrish (MS), many of whom are active members of BLTN today.

Sheri Skelton (BL ’97). “Imagination and Common Sense: Making the Connection to the Natural World,” Bread Loaf Teacher Network Magazine Spring 2004: 39-43. Sheri was editor of the BLTN Magazine in 2004. (The complete collection of BLTN magazines is available at http://www.middlebury.edu/blse/bltn/magazine .

Barnett Barry with Renee Moore (BL ’97). Teaching 2030: What We Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools. Teachers College Press. 2011.  http://www.teaching2030.org/

Experience with earlier printed issues of the BLTN Magazine indicates that the digital Bread Loaf Teacher Network Journal will inspire and encourage members of the BLTN to a produce a stunning range of multimedia essays, narratives, and multi-genre publications about the networked teaching of literacy, literature, and other matters of interest.

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In July 2009, the Ken Macrorie Writing Centers were established to honor the memory of Ken Macrorie, who taught at Bread Loaf for almost two decades. Ken’s students, friends, and many others contributed to the writing centers, which are now flourishing at all four Bread Loaf campuses under the leadership of Beverly Moss, Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University and Bread Loaf faculty member at Bread Loaf-Asheville. Ken taught hundreds of Bread Loaf students, who wrote and edited Yeast, published weekly at Bread Loaf every summer for a decade. They drew upon Ken’s wonderful textbook The I-Search Paper, published in 1988 and still in wide use. A beloved and nationally influential writing teacher and scholar, Ken treated students as partners in learning, writing, and publishing. Ken received many honors, and was passionate about democratic education and the role of literacy in achieving equity. He worked against censorship in all educational settings, and loved his Bread Loaf students and his home, Santa Fe.

Since 2009, dozens of Bread Loaf students who serve as peer tutors in the writing centers on Bread Loaf campuses (and many more who consult with the tutors at the campuses), have benefited from what has become a Bread Loaf tradition, a resource for every member of the Bread Loaf community, and, increasingly, for the students and colleagues of Bread Loaf teachers in public and private schools across the U.S.

Writing Center leaders since 2009 have written about their experiences. The excerpts below mark the well-established path from experience on the Bread Loaf campus in Ripton, Vermont, to the spreading of roots in local K-12 schools and districts.

Jen Hansum (BLSE ‘03), Writing and Teaching Consultant, Bucknell Writing Center, Bucknell University, coordinated the Bread Loaf  Macrorie Writing Center in Vermont in  2010 and 2011. She shared the following reflections from Writing Center consultants and Bread Loaf, Vermont, students:

“As a peer reader in the Marcrorie Writing Center this summer, I read a comparison of movie, theatrical, and television performances of A Streetcar Named Desire, an essay exploring notions of suicide in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Dostoyevsky’s Devils, and an analysis of a photograph in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. I read pieces that were highly polished and (less often) others that needed a lot of work, usually because the writer hadn’t quite figured out what he or she wanted to say. I met with students who were frequent users of the writing center and those who, coming for the first time, didn’t quite know what to expect. But the nearly universal thread was that the writers I worked with were eager to delve further into the texts and questions they’d discussed in class. They sought feedback on their ideas and their writing not only to do better in a particular course, but also to develop as writers and thinkers. For this reason I generally found my experience in the Center to be more rewarding than my two previous stints at writing centers, where a small but significant minority of students wanted us simply to “fix” their papers. At Bread Loaf I didn’t feel like a tutor instructing a student; instead, I was having a conversation about the arts and writing with a peer. In this way, my writing center experience epitomized what, to me, Bread Loaf is about: communication that leads to discoveries about literature, writing, and ourselves.

“[My experience] was amazing. I tutor writing as part of my teaching responsibilities, and I feel like I understand the peer tutoring process but [my peer reader] was phenomenal. She offered tons of positive feedback, brought great questions to the table, and taught me a few things about organization. Working with a peer reader was a highlight of my Bread Loaf experience this summer…I can’t say enough good things about my experience with the BLSE Writing Lab.”

Susannah Kilbourne, (BLSE 2011), Teacher and Teaching Coach at Lafayette High School, in Lexington, Kentucky, wrote about coordinating the writing center on the Oxford campus, 2012.

“Since the Bread Loaf Oxford Writing Center (BLOX WC) was first introduced in 2012, the tutors and I did a significant amount of work not only tutoring BLOX students but also promoting and explaining the purpose and structure of a writing center. Many BLOX users were unfamiliar with the purpose of a writing center that functions independent of classroom instruction, but we found that students who had visited writing centers on other Bread Loaf campuses became not only the BLOX WC’s best customers but also its most effective advocates. Students new to the Oxford campus also found that the BLOX Writing Center sessions served as useful preparation for the one-to-one tutorials with professors that are such a vital part of the Oxford University instructional philosophy.”

At the Santa Fe campus, the Writing Center activity led to a year-round online resource for local center development.

“The Writing Rodeo, Bread Loaf Santa Fe’s writing center, provided its users with an effective, cost-effective model for establishing writing centers that help students visiting the centers for help on writing projects, teachers across the curriculum, and tutors as well. Using Breadnet, the software that links Bread Loaf students during the academic year in their home schools, I organized an exchange for those of us in the process of establishing writing centers at our home schools. This online exchange raised pedagogical issues, management matters, and methods of documenting and evaluating our work this common goal. The outcome: a confirmation that writing centers based on peer tutoring and collaboration have a big role to play in improving teaching, learning, and especially writing abilities, in our schools.” (Susannah Kilbourne)

Bread Loaf peer tutors are the stars of the Macrorie Writing Centers’ story. Two Asheville peer tutors wrote about the experience:

“Tutoring fellow Bread Loaf graduate students was rewarding, and it gave me an opportunity to talk as never before with professional peers about academic and intellectual issues as well as about the writing process. The Writing Center has transformed Bread Loaf, creating a community that I’ve been in need of for some time.”

“One of the greatest benefits of working as a tutor in the Writing Center is that I have become a more involved member of the Bread Loaf community than I have been in summers past at Bread Loaf. Through the work I’ve done in the center–which is outside  my own courses, my own thinking, even my own interests–I’ve gained a deeper sense of the deep commitment that others have to the study of literature, poetry, writing and teaching.”

The influence of the Writing Centers goes beyond the Bread Loaf campuses. In 2011, the Write to Change Foundation awarded start-up grants to outstanding Bread Loaf students and alumni, trained in writing center pedagogy and practice, who are establishing writing centers in their schools in 2012-13: Katie Lupo (Pennsylvania), Susannah Kilbourne (Kentucky), Flor Mota (Texas), Deborah Alcorn (North Carolina), and April Raymond (South Carolina).

Flor Mota, a current BLSE student and English Department Co-chair at A. N. McCallum High School in Austin, Texas, wrote recently about the McCallum High School Writing Center. Having served as a peer tutor at the Macrorie Writing Center at Bread Loaf Asheville, Mota received a grant of $500 in 2012 to establish a writing center at her school. Her experience as a Bread Loaf Writing Center tutor is clearly making a difference to her entire school community.

“Since the McCallum High School Writing Center re-opened in September 2012, we’ve have more than 100 visits, many of them from returning students. This year we were open five days a week; peer tutors are committed to doing their best, and it’s working! We meet every couple of weeks to evaluate our work and discuss ways to improve. We’re planning a visit to the University of Texas-Austin Writing Center for a training session. Students visiting our Writing Center and their teachers are happy with the help they’re getting: they evaluate the experience and we pay attention to what they say. The writing tutors are proud of their work and are themselves becoming in the process better writers. In just one year, the Writing Center has become an important resource for teachers and students at McCallum High School.”

Debbie Alcorn, 2011 BLSE M.A. and current M.Litt. candidate, and English teacher at Northern High School in Durham, North Carolina, recently updated us on the beginnings of a writing center in her school.

Northern High School’s New Writing Center and Poetic Justice
“Inspired by the success other Bread Loafers have had establishing writing centers at their high schools, I approached Kathryn Bonner, the principal of my high school, about establishing a writing center at Northern High School in Durham. She was very positive and especially liked the idea because of the new Common Core mandates for writing across the curriculum. She also suggested that I contact Alicia Stevenson, our new assistant principal, because Alicia had run a writing center as a teacher. Alicia agreed to find a space to house the center and get it running. Dixie Goswami, Director of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network, strongly encouraged us and helped secure a start-up grant funded through Write to Change. I also received essential and timely information from Bread Loaf Professor Beverly Moss.

This year the project really took off. My Assistant Principal Alicia shared her ideas for the project. We met with Matt Hunt, another of our assistant principals; they were so enthused about the project and had such great plans, which I could not have put into place by myself, and I was happy to have such support. Their vision included making the center open to parents in the evening and to provide project supplies to students who needed them.

Moreover, we’ve done some writing ourselves: we began work on a proposal for a grant to Design for Accelerated Progress (DAP) that was available locally through Durham County. I wrote a grant proposal for “Poetic Justice” that was included in the project, and Northern High received full funding for the DAP grant, which furnished the Writing Center with desks, chairs, materials, and fifteen computers. Licenses will be purchased for the students to take the ACT/SAT online preparation courses; teachers will be paid stipends for working in the center, and $2,000.00 was allocated for a professional writing center library. In all, Northern High received $59,300 for the writing center, the Poetic Justice program, and other literacy programs at Northern this year. All of these wonderful initiatives began with the inspirations I received from my experience working and learning among the motivated professional teachers who attend the Bread Loaf School of English.

The Ken Macrorie Bread Loaf Writing Centers highlight the power of collaboration at Bread Loaf, drawing on the community–faculty, staff, peer tutors, Bread Loaf students–to create a rich and evolving resource for the community. Beyond Bread Loaf, writing centers led by Bread Loaf teachers are changing the culture of writing and collaboration in schools. Writing centers will serve all Bread Loaf campuses in 2013.

by Brent Peters.

Before becoming an English teacher and Bread Loaf student, Brent Peters worked as a chef at the Mayan Café in Louisville, Kentucky. Joe Franzen has been an urban gardener, sustainability enthusiast, environmental educator, and kitchen magician for years. He has turned Fern Creek Traditional High School into an “edible campus.”

In Room 209 at Fern Creek Traditional High School, three walls are brick, and one wall is full of windows and a view of the courtyard where students eat lunch. Lunches burst with conversation and swirls of activity that move inside and around the classroom. Students are tempted to turn in their chairs and peek out on friends. I am tempted too. A very durable plant also bends toward the window, in spite of my attempts to rotate it regularly. I understand that the view outside, the natural light, and the sounds from the courtyard signal the world going on around us, and the turn of students toward the light encapsulates a simple principle of growth: plants, students, and teachers grow toward the light, and whether light is knowledge, nourishment, or illumination, all interpretations are resonant. Classroom instruction should allow students and teachers to interact with the world and grow toward the light.

A friend and co-teacher, Mr. Joe Franzen, and I had an idea for an English class called Food Lit that would be loud with participatory voices and possibilities to make connections to the world. The class is a Junior English course aligned with the same Common Core and College and Career Readiness Standards as other Junior English classes, but food is the theme.

Last year, we approached our principal, Dr. Houston Barber, and our forward-thinking administration at Fern Creek High School in Louisville, Kentucky, with the idea for the class. They granted us one Food Lit class for one trimester to see if students, many of whom were already struggling in their English classes, could identify with a food theme and show academic growth. Fortunately for us, students who stayed after school to work in the garden, cook, share, enjoy a meal, laugh, talk, think, and debate food-related issues in Mr. Franzen’s Cooking and Environmental Clubs were already making the case.

We knew that students were interested in food. We did not foresee the immense potential the class has to bring down walls: walls between school and home, school and community, between academic disciplines, and between students and their social structures. When our class went to the school garden, we naturally started talking about botany and agriculture. Seamlessly, the conversation moved to include chemistry, history, mathematics, global issues, social justice, language, geography, and nutrition. We also noticed that students who were not talking in class became very vocal outside the classroom, and students who may not have talked to each other in class were laughing together as they were planting rye as a cover crop or picking cabbage worms off winter cabbages.

Everyone has a food story. We started this year’s class by creating a personal food map. When we put ourselves next to “food,” a flood of memories, associations, connections, and food favorites start to surface. We begin to think of all the people, places, and emotions that are attached to food. The food maps invite a pedagogy of sharing and listening. They also uncover specifics like Dad’s Peanut Butter Hershey Kiss Cookies and realizations like Food is the one thing that helps me store family traditions. The food maps fill pages: class starts from a place of strength because students know their food story is personal, valuable, and unique. The sometimes hesitant students learning English as a second or third language are encouraged to connect to home and homeland, and their not-so-often-talked-about experiences become visible. Knowledge moves around the class like it moves around the tables in the courtyard at lunch. Students are excited to share.

Food Lit challenges what can “count” as text. After having the opportunity to take two of Dr. David Kirkland’s classes at Bread Loaf that focused on expanding literacies, I see that we live in a world where we are bombarded by messages which are in many ways in conversation with each other. We read these messages, but do we think about them critically, and what is the cost of not considering them seriously? In Food Lit, we start each unit with a big question like What is good food? Is sugar bad food? or Is school lunch saving our generation? We read articles, interviews, stories, editorials, and blogs, but we read many other food texts which allow our experiences and food choices outside of the classroom to be invited in. Our investigation also leads us out of the classroom. To answer what is good food, we read our weekend meals, our class meal, recipes, our school garden, and our visits to local family and organic farms. To determine if sugar is bad food, we read the grocery store, cereal boxes, candy, energy bars, and sodas. With each, we measure the amount of sugar per serving and to see how much actual sugar we are saying yes to when we choose a snack. In our school lunch investigation, we read our lunch tables, interviews of students during lunch, pictures of our lunches for a week, pictures of school lunches around the world, and interviews with our school cafeteria workers. When we move to the writing process, students have a depth of knowledge that links to authentic experiences and opposing viewpoints on issues. Students stand for a certain point of view by standing in various physical spaces to form an answer to these loaded questions.

The class propels students to become advocates for food literacy and to speak to ways that the course is allowing them to make connections that go beyond the classroom walls. They are discovering a voice that is attached to action. Recently students have presented at KCTE Conference in Lexington, Kentucky; the Healthy Foods, Local Farms Conference in Louisville, Kentucky; and at the Watson Conference of Rhetoric at the University of Louisville.

At a recent conference, a participant was listening to our students speak about their findings in the school lunch room. A student, Irvin, spoke of a real lack of choice in school lunch offerings. He said that by fourth lunch students are left with a few choices. Students at his table, some who do not eat pork because of religious reasons, choose not to eat at all because the selections that are left are only pork offerings. Irvin contrasted his experience in the lunchroom with a recent class meal that Food Lit students shared.

Irvin described the steaming heap of tortillas served with rice, beans, grilled vegetables, roasted corn, butternut squash puree (sweet and savory versions), pico de gallo, pickled red onions, marinated chilies, and herbed sour cream. Irvin boasted that all of the vegetables came from our school garden. He added that he had more energy at soccer practice than he normally has after eating school lunch. Irvin went on to explain that none of the vegetables that are picked by students in the garden can go to the school cafeteria and that a lot of students take the fresh fruit offerings in the lunch room (e.g., an apple, sliced canned peaches) and throw them directly in the compost bin. The participant looked at Irvin and the students around him and said, “You all have enormous networks; you all could be the voices that cause a tremendous sway for your friends. Your voices could cause a shift. Do you realize how much power you have?”

What if teachers approached instruction with this question in mind? What power do we all have, and what changes can we make as a result of that power? These questions have been at the heart of our Food Lit class at Fern Creek Traditional High School. What happens when students know that there are better food choices because students know how to make the better choice from the ground up? The Food Lit curriculum invites students and teachers to feed not just our intellectual, emotional, and physical hunger, but also to feed the desire to become the type of critical thinkers who realize that they can do something to help be the light that nourishes a generation.

Emily Bartels, Dixie Goswami, Doug Wood, Lou Bernieri and I met with Karen Cator, Director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Education Technology in April 2012. We gathered to discuss how Bread Loaf Teacher Network teachers might inform the national dialogue on “Connected Teaching and Learning”–a core tenet of BLTN culture for decades. What ensued was a truly “Bread Loafian” moment: a fascinating turn of conversation took place between Ms. Cator and Emily Bartels, a Shakespearian scholar and Bread Loaf’s Director. Karen took a deep interest in how a Bread Loaf student encountering the foreign–in the language and culture of literature—might really be gaining capacity in the most important of 21^st century learning skills: the ability to suspend one’s own assumptions and to navigate confidently and empathetically the culture and language of a previously foreign space. Karen’s active listening led to her suggestion that she come to the Bread Loaf Vermont campus at the beginning of August to kick off “Connected Educator Month.”

In addition to meeting with Bread Loaf administrators to discuss ongoing national initiatives and to learn about the history of BLTN, Karen participated in a panel of presentations by Bread Loaf Teachers.

• David Wandera outlined how his association with the BLTN has helped him to forge international teaching collaborations and to identify his own doctoral interests at the The Ohio State University.
• Lou Bernieri and Jineyda Tapia articulated the vision for Teach Lawrence, the movement catalyzed by the Andover Bread Loaf partnership, supporting the development of local teachers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
• Lorena German spoke about “connected teaching” as a process of connecting with family and culture as a key component to breaking down the isolation of teaching and schools from students’ lives.
• Holly Spinelli added the dimensions of service and leadership to connected teaching, as she described how she and Jineyda Tapia created a Wiki to engage their respective students at the City as School in New York City and Lawrence High School in service and leadership projects.
• Brent Peters gave a detailed account of his collaboration with fellow Louisville, Kentucky teacher Joe Franzen to develop student literacies in reading the world of food and consumer consumption.
• Charlene Ortuno of Miami, Florida gave an instance of an innovative collaboration with Louisville BLTN teacher Paul Barnwell, as their students collaboratively crafted and critiqued media using synchronous Skype conferences for live small group collaborations, Google Docs, and YouTube.

Karen Cator’s professional roots in teaching and administration were clear as she listened intently and asked probing questions about the realities of these exceptional teachers’ work. Karen repeatedly impelled Bread Loaf teachers to disseminate carefully produced case studies of these exceptional practices.

Ms. Cator addressed the entire campus community in the Barn that evening, in a talk informed by the BLTN presentations and guided by the slides shown here:

A lively dialogue ensued–and continues—around the challenges to the roles of K-12 schools and higher education institutions in the face of “anytime, anywhere” learning like that supported by Khan Academy. A spark that continues to ignite conversation came from Cator’s recounting of the experience of several “MOOCs” (Massively Open Online Courses), where thousands of students participated in college-level instruction. At Bread Loaf, where learners expect to have intensive seminar-based experiences guided by colleagues or faculty–both within the face-to-face and the online terrain of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network–the conversation will always be informed by decades of practice in highly interactive connected teaching and learning.

by Lorena German, Lawrence, Massachusetts. 

In 1998 I walked into high school and that afternoon we were ushered into the auditorium for the freshman assembly. Among the rules and warnings that were announced to us, we were told, “Look to your left. Look to your right. The person next to you might not be here in four years.” And they were right. My freshman class entered Lawrence High School at around 700 students and in 2001 graduated 371 young people. Years later, after much fighting myself and my educational traumas, I walked back into LHS, this time though, as a teacher.

Today I teach young people English Language Arts. The neighborhood I work in is not an easy one to live in. Lawrence has many negative issues; yet because I’m from here, I also know the beauties in Lawrence. I know what it means to be from here and still live here. Therefore, being an effective teacher is a serious task at the top of my priorities. In order for me to meet my own high expectations I have to continually review and reflect on my practice and what sustains me. I think of the young people like myself and the higher development I could have had if I had better teachers in a more functional system. I think of my friends who were and still are highly literate in “non-standard English” ways yet who were ignored, so I work to celebrate student voices. One of the most important ways to be effective, in my eyes, is to be a connected educator.

A connected educator is an educator deeply connected through various means to many sources, but most importantly to his or her students and the community in which they educate. As an educator I am connected in many ways to my students, my colleagues, my city, and other educators throughout the U.S. and abroad. Honoring this human network of connections is the only way I see to be effective in Lawrence. In the digital age we live in, this connectivity is enhanced by our access to technology. I don’t see technology as the “connector”; I see the educator as connected or disconnected. Technology is but an avenue.

In Lawrence, Massachusetts, being disconnected from the city and the students leads to a void that causes many gaps. As a teacher I am connected to my students through their language, culture, and way of life so I have the opportunity to create an environment where student identities are celebrated in a space highly focused on student assessing vs. student expression. Since I am from Lawrence, the city my students are from, there are certain aspects of my students’ experiences that need no translation, interpretation, or explanation. I am connected to my students’ realities and their struggles. I am aware of their feelings and can sincerely relate to their pain.

Being connected, for me, goes beyond a digital space. It actually comes full circle to the very classroom I teach in. In order for me to be effective and connected, I need to allow my students’ lives and realities to find a space in our classroom dialogue and text so that we can have conversations about social justice and social change. Since many of my students’ realities are in dire need of improvement and resolution, I can’t expect these learners to leave their problems at the door and come to my classroom as if these struggles were only on TV. I must allow the life of Lawrence to leak into my classroom as a way to engage my students,. I want to show these young people that learning is connected to life and that our classroom experience is relevant.

The coursework we engage in during the year is another means for me to stay connected. I help students understand that they need to also be connected to their community and to each other. We use poetry in my classroom as a means to stay connected to social justice. There is no way to live in Lawrence and not desire or work towards social change. As a result, we have to discuss social justice in school; if not in my classroom, then where?

In addition to being connected to my students as an educator, I am a writer and this, too, connects me. Being a writer connects me to my city and to the obstacles we face daily as a community. As I write, I write about my students, I write about my profession, my city, and all aspects of my life. This writing–where I express my heart and build my soul–connects me to the voice of my city.

Being a connected educator requires humility because I have to be ready to learn from my students and to work alongside them. We are connected in many ways, and bringing those connections into the classroom space, in my opinion, is the only way to be an effective educator in Lawrence. I would like to say that it’s the only way anywhere else, too.

Online Exchange Practices Deepen Local Work

by Holly Spinelli, New York City

For the past decade, the U.S. media’s reports on our country’s public educational system have been bleak and disheartening. These reports largely focus on the negative agents destroying public education from the top down: slashed budgets, rapidly increasing class sizes that show no signs of slowing, local school boards and other officials closing schools that fail to meet policy makers’  inconsistent criteria, and teacher “performance” relying all too heavily on student test scores. It is obvious that the public education system is under attack on several fronts, but educators across the country have been successfully combating the constant barrage of stifling oppression by participating in innovative and creative professional educational exchanges through the Bread Loaf Teacher Network (BLTN).

Every day, educators  are on the front lines fighting for what little is left of their professional rights and for the high quality educational experiences that their students deserve. This sentiment and the vibrant educational opportunities emerging from it have and continue to be the epicenter of the Bread Loaf Teacher Network. BLTN provides a unique online forum for its members to engage their students in educational exchanges both inside and beyond the classroom. The network also serves as a continuous  development resource for educators across the country and all over the world. BLTN has been a key component to keeping my teaching practices fresh, meaningful, and most importantly, student-centered and collaborative while I continue to meet those looming state standards. I have participated in several successful  projects in the past, and I am eager to begin new collaborations and conversations with other BLTN members for this school year.

This fall, I will participate in a year-long professional dialogue with teachers from the Navajo Nation: Susan Miera, Evelyn Begody, Anissa Shaver, and Crystal Wood. Though I work in a public transfer high school in New York City, we have found that our students face similar obstacles that hinder their performance in school. Many of our students struggle with poverty, violence, and substance abuse in their homes and neighborhoods, teen pregnancy, depression, and the everyday pressures that are often associated with being a teenager. We intend to discuss ways to meet the literacy needs for struggling readers and writers in our respective under-served populations. We hope to identify resources both inside and outside the classroom to help inform our own practices and to better assist our students with getting the resources they need so that we can get them on track to becoming stronger readers and writers. This exchange will also serve as a supportive community to help one another voice our concerns and to celebrate our successes in our classrooms throughout the year. Professional exchanges like this one are essential to keeping me from burning out and getting discouraged. I am lucky to work in a supportive educational environment, but the BLTN exchanges keep me in contact with experienced educators beyond my scope of practice who help keep me motivated with their fresh perspectives.

In addition to the professional exchange, I will also participate in a student-centered educational exchange with BLTN member Christopher Moore. Moore teaches in a public high school in Ohio. (See Digital Learning Partnerships:  Transforming the Way Students–and Teachers–Think about 21st Century Learning for an article co-authored by Chris in this issue.) Chris and I plan on having our junior and senior college-bound students share their college application essays with one another. We hope that providing the students with an online writing workshop model with peers outside of their own school will do more than help them enhance their writing skills. We hope it will give students a platform for their voices to be heard, a place for their creativity to flow, and a positive peer environment to boost their confidence in their writing and in themselves. This exchange will benefit the students because sharing their writing with a real outside audience that, unlike college admissions committees, will give them feedback before submitting their applications, will offer students the opportunity to prepare their writing for an audience other than a teacher. The peer exchange will allow students to share helpful tips, ideas, and offer one another encouragement throughout the college application process. The writing, sharing, and editing process among the students is an authentic and un-intimidating way for them to showcase their writing and editing skills in a non-judgmental, supportive, and organic manner. BLTN student exchanges like this one enable students of all backgrounds and skill-levels to communicate and create with one another without the pressures of being graded or “meeting a standard.”

Politicians, school board members, and non-believers can continue to wage their war on public education, but BLTN’s creative, supportive, and well-established online exchange practices have demonstrated time and time again that despite an ever-changing educational climate, authentic learning experiences like those through the BLTN will always prevail.

by Shirley Brice Heath,
Stanford University. 

Shirley Brice Heath, Professor Emerita at Stanford University, taught at Bread Loaf-Vermont for nine summers, from 1982-2001, working with several of her Bread Loaf students as co-researchers on inquiries about literacy and the arts. Ways with Words:  Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms was published in 1983. Two chapters in particular shaped the principles and practices of BLTN: “Teachers as Learners” and “Learners as Ethnographers,” which portray teachers and students as learning researchers, building bridges between classrooms and communities. Her most recent book, Words at Work and Play: Three decades in family and community life, traces connections between school, family, and community activities and organizations. “Talking Writing” considers the kind of conversational writing that is at the heart of BLTN: “Conversations involve give-and-take, exchange of information and opinions, questions and conjectures, and debates about differences of opinion or grasp of facts. This kind of talk takes time…and lays the foundation of language essential to writing and reading extended texts.”

*  *  *

• As teachers and learners, we easily fall into the persuasive trap of thinking that if only we communicate sufficiently and care enough, the young people who walk into our classrooms will gain the same love and passion we have for reading and writing extended texts, such as those of fiction, history, science, politics, and the visual arts. We feel certain that they will engage as we have done with the intricacies of written language.

It takes only a few years of teaching to come to the realization that this conviction carries over into reality relatively rarely. Reasons why this is the case come in the pressures of history and economics–topics that do not usually come up in our language arts and English classes.

The first historical fact that shapes how our students feel today about reading and writing extended texts comes in the radical differences between teachers’ and students’ socialization into oral and written language. Teachers can generally remember carrying out both work and play projects that stretched over several hours, if not days and weeks, when they were young. These projects took place between child and adult(s) and were usually related to the life of the family household: food preparation, yard clean-up and garden planting, and extended tasks of repairing or building something around the house. Board games, such as Monopoly, often stretched on for several days, as did putting up and taking down model trains or complex Lego projects. During these times of work and play, adults and the young talked about what they were doing together, how they felt about it, and what they needed to do to accomplish what they wanted to do. In short, most teachers in today’s classrooms grew up talking in long stretches of conversation, reading directions and recipes, and writing thank-you notes, greeting cards, and birthday letters.

Economics and technology together have altered all these aspects of socialization for today’s young. Within mainstream school-oriented families, young people spend more after-school and weekend hours taking part in organized sports and other community activities led by “intimate strangers,” such as coaches, Scout leaders, and karate or music teachers, than they do with their parents. “Intimate strangers” dedicate their time with young people to instruction and guidance on how to do specific activities. Free-ranging conversations surrounding long-term projects of play and work have to be limited in both length and number throughout the season. Today, young people who enter our classrooms may well have had in any week of their adolescence only a handful of conversations of more than four minutes with an adult. Conversations involve give-and-take, exchange of information and opinions, questions and conjectures, and debates about differences of opinion or grasp of facts. This kind of talk takes time. Moreover, this kind of talk lays the foundation of language essential to writing and reading extended texts.

Some who read the above paragraph may easily reach the conclusion that this change amounts to a diminishing of language experiences for today’s young. Yes and no. No, since our students use their various forms of technology to create, respond to, and read and think about a much wider range of genres than did their teachers as children or teenagers. Aside from the obvious “multiliteracies” that come with Facebook, YouTube, and Vimeo, young people today generate and view book and film trailers, “adbusters,” apps, tweets, blogs, and a host of Internet sites devoted to photography, science topics, new art forms, and authors of young adult (YA) fiction. In addition to reading YA fiction, many write their own sequels to YA fictional works and provide critiques and reviews for one another and, occasionally, for librarians who see the value in enlisting YA readers as advisers on acquisitions. In short, today’s young read more genres, media, and modes than most teachers ever imagined possible.

Yes, some kinds of language experiences are diminished for today’s young. My long-term (30-year) study of language in families across three generations shows that genres of multiliteracies reflect specific language features that differ from those that occur in extended academic texts. For example, in today’s genres, young people tend to read and to use simple present or simple past tenses (rarely do any perfect tenses occur). Their specialized or “rare” vocabulary is tied to special-interest topics, such as sports, popular entertainment forms and personalities, and art and science forms, such as photography, film,videogaming, and music. They read and produce very few comparatives or hypotheticals (e.g., if-then statements), and their genres include few substantive questions that draw on material beyond the immediate text or pursuit.

Scholars from the fields of child language and brain sciences increasingly report the push-forward advantages of language input during infancy and toddlerhood. Academic success is more likely to come to those adolescents who have had at least 1,200 words per hour of language input in their earliest years. Such input needs, however, to extend beyond mere labels (e.g., “show me the cat”) or instructions. The young need conversations with adults about what may seem to be “nothing”–peeling a banana, the colors of the leaves on the tree outside the window, or, better yet, the narrative and illustrations of children’s literature. In their joint reading, children and adults talk about characters, actions, possibilities, promises, turns of events, and sequences of action. These topics matter over the long run, for within such talk lie several different tenses, types of sentences, hypothetical proposals, comparatives, and various question types.

Once children who have not had either the quantity or quality of language input noted above reach their first years in classrooms, is it too late? What can teachers do throughout the primary and secondary years? Not surprisingly, the simple answer lies in projects that involve young learners in planning, thinking ahead, and weighing outcomes. Window gardening during the early years leads children to imagine roles and outcomes. So does taking part in readers theater or classroom enactments of literature. Such projects involve language that characterizes extended texts of academic life. Former Bread Loafer Eileen Landay and Brown University colleague Kurt Wootton have just written a book that tells us all this and much more. They show how telling stories, dialoguing, rehearsing and revising text, and performing texts build community and instill habits of reflection among students. Their years of experience in classrooms give us many reasons to know that when we link literacy and oral language (or lots and lots of talking) to the arts (and the sciences) in extended community-building projects, language learning comes through meaningful practice and performance. Moreover, the book gives numerous multi-year examples of how teachers create their own face-to-face and virtual professional communities when they become engaged with their students in talking writing” all the way into performance.

References

Heath, Shirley Brice (2012).  Words at work and play:  Three decades in family and community life.  New York:  Cambridge University Press.

Landay, Ellen and Wootton, Kurt (2012).  A reason to read:  Linking literacy and the arts.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard Education Press.