Reflecting on the Village Writing Project’s Summer Institute
The National Writing Project (NWP) and its site-based summer institutes for teachers were brought to my attention about twenty years ago by a fellow writer and teacher named Susan Shehane. Susan was a wonderful and kind person, who taught high school English in Wetumpka. She and I got to know each other because of her long essay “Alabama Listening in the Cold War Era,” which contained an array of loosely connected stories of growing up in the years after World War II. The essay version had won the Alabama School of Fine Arts’ creative nonfiction contest for teachers – when that was still going on – and in seeking a publisher for it, Susan had encountered one editor after another who wanted to change it fundamentally into something else. Frustrated by this, she asked me to help her self-publish it. It was during our work together that she encouraged me to attend the summer institute at Auburn’s then-Sun Belt Writing Project, an iteration (prior to the current Village Writing Project) that was founded in 1981. As a fellow English teacher, Susan believed I would get a lot out of it . . . but, on my end, there was always a reason to put it off: the need for childcare, work on other projects, conflicts with the dates of the institute. Those practical concerns ate up about fifteen years, then COVID hit in 2020, then I left my job as a public school teacher in 2022. By then, the Sun Belt Writing Project had gone defunct. (No source I’ve seen gives certain year that it ended.)
After a short few years without a site at Auburn, the Village Writing Project became the university’s current NWP affiliate. My revived interest in the institute came about through my role as our college’s writing assistance guy. Because what I do is like a writing center, I had met a few folks at Auburn University’s Miller Writing Center and, through them, became aware of the Village Writing Project. Their first summer institute had been held in 2024, and I jumped on board for their second one this summer.
The NWP’s summer institute is a “professional development experience focused on providing K-12 teachers, administrators, and others with opportunities to collaborate, reflect, write, and grow together [and] a space to learn from and with other educators and to develop the knowledge, the network, and the agency to teach beyond the standards, to engage and explore writing as individuals, and to gain insight into issues of social justice and equity that face our classrooms and communities today.” I doubt if being a teacher of writing has ever been easy . . . for anybody who has ever tried. The challenges are numerous: there are myriad ways to teach this skill, students often want to stick to previous teachers’ methods, there are just as many ways to do it right as to do it wrong, each genre has its own modes and manners . . . These variables often lead to resistance among students (and parents, too). So, in our profession, we are always looking for new ways to impart our lessons.
In that spirit, the focus of the Village Writing Project’s summer institute, led by Auburn professors Mike Cook and Charlie Lesh, was something called multimodal writing. This relatively new idea says that everything we read and many things we write or compose in modern culture consist of multiple modes of communication: not only words as a block of text, but also font choices, colors, imagery, layout grids, movement, sounds, video, voiceovers. So, because that is true, we should consider and include these aspects as we teach writing to our students. I’ll admit that I was at first resistant to this idea, since those elements seem to me more like graphic design than writing per se. But I kept an open mind, read what we were given, listened to what was said, and considered these ideas. Within a day or two at the institute, I began understand the point that was being made. Almost every bit of “writing” that we consume in modern culture comes to us in some form that is more dynamic than black text on white paper. We all look at websites, read magazines, see billboards, view commercials, watch TV and movies, scroll social media posts, look at fliers, regard signage, almost all of it utilizing some form of design or presentation that is not simply black serif text on a white background. Then, at school, writing teachers mostly want students to produce black serif text on a white page— just words, no fancy fonts, no color bars, no pull quotes, no movement, no graphics, no pictures . . . just black serif text on a white page. The proponents of multimodal writing raise the question of why we aren’t teaching writing in a way that corresponds with real-world consumption habits.
The main portion of the two-week summer institute ended a month ago (today), and we will reconvene briefly this fall for our follow-up. The experience has broadened my mind about what it means to “write” and to teaching writing in the 21st century. What resulted from the experience, for me, were a new set of branded graphics related to my own writing work and a multimodal writing assignment for the Literature and Music survey course that I’m teaching this fall. The branded graphics were something that I had wanted to achieve for sometime, a way to tie together the promotion of disparate aspects of my work – blog, column, books, poetry, quotes – within one consistent set of recognizable imagery. What that meant was taking the colors on the website, expanding the color pallet, using a consistent set of fonts, standardizing the imagery, and tailoring each graphic to its use. The writing assignment for the literature survey class was more cut-and-dried, though its formation was aided by the ideas in the institute: how do people process and understand sound, imagery, and writing when they appear together?
Having let the lessons of the institute settle in, I would recommend to any writing teacher to participate in one of these NWP offerings. (And don’t wait as long as I did!) Most of my teaching career has been spent on the high school level, but my work today has me with college undergraduates. The lessons are just as valuable where I am now. Beyond that, the group of middle and high school teachers I was with augmented the learning offered by the institute’s leaders, who are university professors, by adding their own insights on teaching both English language arts and social studies. I got to think about what I was producing, of course, but I also learned from the other teachers as I saw how they interpreted these ideas and created their own methods for writing and teaching. And even beyond the learning and the camaraderie, there is the practical benefit of earning those CEUs for the ol’ teaching certificate renewal!
