Creating a Community of Writers
by Katrina Clark
written for the 2012 Invitational Summer Institute
I started this morning throwing up. No, I’m not pregnant. It was just the common, anxious excitement of the morning before a big performance. Today was the day that I performed a poetry piece for my students and I was nervous. The 9th graders were finishing up our unit on Romeo and Juliet and the 9th grade English team presented seven possible options for them to choose from for their final projects. I designed a project around character dialogue and slam poetry connecting several of our units this year. Students who chose the slam poetry project would pair up and write poems as characters from Romeo and Juliet. By completing this project I wanted to challenge my students to find both points of tension and commonalities between characters on a chosen topic and have the characters interact with each other to create an original narrative. Students would then write and perform their poetry pieces as the characters.
Since I was asking my students to complete this project, I found it important to do the assignment myself. I do this for several reasons. First, it is useful to have a model of a completed assignment for the students to preview ahead of time. Students then get the look and feel of what a complete project is like. Second, I want to make sure the project is doable and that I have a clear vision. If I can’t complete my own project, how can I expect the students to do so? Third, writing does not always come easily to me and I find it useful to struggle through a writing assignment the way many of my students may struggle. As I work through the writing process I note where I get stuck. Sometimes I find a place where I need an extra brainstorm. Often I find myself reaching for a structure to fill in. Would a T-chart help here? Maybe a Venn diagram. I push myself to go through the authentic writing process so that I can be a mentor for my students when they struggle on the same path. I can say things like, “I got stuck in this place and two things I tried were...” or “Some questions I asked myself at this moment were...” It’s not that I find a solution for my students, but that I model the struggle and the success of completing a difficult assignment.
Writing is personal. I can’t think of anything that makes a student more vulnerable than sharing a piece of writing with classmates. It’s not that through our writing we often share private thoughts--sometimes we don’t ever get there--but maybe it’s more that we share our own thought processes. Through our writing it is possible to see our struggle, our reaching for the right word, our fumble through a run-on sentence, our battle with the empty page, the trust (or lack of trust) that we have in our own ideas and our ability to express them. Therefore, as a teacher of writers, I find the biggest struggle is to get students to try to write. Many of my students have had such negative experiences with school, teachers, and writing of their words and ideas labeled “wrong” or “incorrect” that they do not wish to share any longer. They feel more comfortable watching others or making fun of their peers than trying. Getting students to try is the first mountain of becoming a writer.
In order to climb this mountain it is essential that students feel safe and successful. I find a unit on poetry always works best. Students can complete an entire piece in one sitting and feel accomplished. Poetry comes in a range of structures and thus is accessible to a range of students at once. Through poetry I ask my students to transform words into images and images into meaning. I ask them to hide messages in between their words. I love watching students climb the gentle staircase of scaffolded assignments, refusing to call themselves poets until the moment they complete an extended metaphor poem and hear the meaning reflected back at them. When we hang their completed work up I often go up to a struggling writer and whisper to them, “Can you believe you once said you weren’t a poet? Crazy, huh?” How many smiles have I seen spread across a student’s face who just realized he’s been proven wrong and doesn’t mind it one bit.
The struggle to write is a struggle to overcome the feelings of inadequacy that plague so many of us. We question our ability and our right to fill a page with our ideas. Writing is a struggle of agency. And this is why it is so important. We do not write to get a grade. We do not write to express our emotions. We write to express our power, our right and our ability to affect the world we live in. While reading is how an individual allows the world to affect the self, writing is how the self affects the world. It is making one's imprint upon others. When one comes to identify herself as a writer she has accepted her own power to change. It does not matter who the intended audience is, whether it be a nation, a community, a friend, or self. Writers are change agents. As my students struggle to write slam poetry about Romeo and Juliet they are taking up a challenge to make their audience think and feel differently about the subject matter. To take on that task is to realize they have the power to affect their audience and thus the world.
The act of writing and the task of encouraging young writers is a continuous challenge. I am seeking a community of writers and teachers who can support me in supporting my students develop as lifelong writers. I am especially looking for other teachers who teach in underperforming schools and often must resist the basic skills curriculum force-fed on our students. I want to be challenged to grow as a writer within a community of writers. I want to pay attention to how such a community is created and discuss ways of creating such communities at my school. I believe taking part in the Philadelphia Writing Project Summer Institute would provide me with the supportive community I need to advocate for role of writing in the curriculum at Olney Charter High School.
Katrina Clark teaches ninth grade English at Olney Charter High School. Katrina joined the Philadelphia Writing Project in 2012 as a participant in the Invitational Summer Institute.