EKU Writing Project

The dry run that is the EKU Writing Project’s Introductory Workshop is no simple dress rehearsal at all. Rather, for the fellows who have been selected to participate in the Summer Institute, it’s more trial-by-fire than easing their way in. I should have known it would be as I made the schedule, largely basing the day’s activities on the schedule EKUWP has been using for at least the last five years. But it wasn’t until I took a breath, right around 3:15, that I realized the day provided no breaks. We throw them in.

Our fellows began the day by writing (I won’t mention the evidently cruel pre-Workshop activity I foisted on them just to find their seats: they weren’t happy). After sharing the writing that started the day they hit the computer lab, to participate in a flipped tag-team Demonstration on website design. With a transition that lasted only long enough to introduce the writing workshop group process and to the writing group members they’ll spend hours with over the next several weeks, fellows spent a full hour workshopping the poems they’re writing before the Summer Institute begins. These groups flowed naturally into the pre-Summer Institute book groups that gave fellows a taste of the reading workshop time that will be a regular part of their daily life this summer and reinforced the see-yourself-as-a-writer message that will help them see themselves as ever-more confident teachers of writing as we move through the summer.

Lunch interrupted reading workshop groups. It might seem that lunch would provide a break, but filling the plates of twenty-five people (because the mentors joined us right on time, after all) in less than thirty minutes is hectic enough, and giving just enough space (physical and temporal) for mentors and fellows to chat – and in some cases meet – devoured whatever might have been left over.

The Writing Project believes that an army marches on its stomach, so after lunch the real work began. Small groups pored over student samples fellows brought in, with a rigid protocol driving our interaction, talking together to think through teaching practices, assignment and assessment questions, writing processes, and Demonstration possibilities.

Mentors are an invaluable part of this process, and as group members talk, fellows and their mentors write furiously, capturing thoughts and making plans. Mentors have experience; they know Demos. We ask them to stay in regular contact with fellows as they leave the Introductory Workshop and wait for the Summer Institute to begin. In the role of mentor, they’ll serve as sounding boards. They’ll translate the wealth of information fellows are provided. They’ll field questions and test out ideas and calm rough waters. Because, like I said, we throw the fellows in. But we know they can swim. Today, they start to prove it to themselves.

My wife and I are both big fans of first days. Destined to become teachers, I guess, we both can recall vividly our first days of kindergarten, our first days of high school (still surprised, looking back, that I wasn’t stuffed into a locker), our first days student teaching, our first days with our own classrooms.

One of the things I like best about my role facilitating the EKU Writing Project Summer Institute each year is power of the first day for each year’s fellows. I think about this now because we had Orientation on Monday evening, that chance for this year’s fellows to come together, to get their feet wet, to have some of their questions answered and fears dispelled while new questions and new fears rose to take their place. There’s a fear and a wonder with first days. And I realize that my job – in the college classroom each semester, in the Writing Project each spring – is to stoke those first days, to let them linger a little bit. For that fear and wonder is a good thing. It might make us feel a little anxious, it probably causes our blood pressure to increase a bit, and it always leaves some scratching their heads wondering just what they’ve gotten into, but it also energizes us. First days are exciting, pregnant with possibility, as the saying goes.

At the same time, though, I realize that Orientation is an incomplete first day for the Writing Project. After all, these fellows already participated in interviews, nerve-wracking in their own right, when fate is yet to be decided. And they still have the Introductory Workshop, that day that by its very name is a start to something. Then there’s the actual first day, when the Summer Institute begins in earnest and leads into, for us at EKU at least, the whole month of June.

The thing that all these first days have in common though is the sense of expectation. The opening of new books. The careful organization of necessary materials. The questions about what will happen when and what matters most. It’s clear, when I field fellows’ questions during Orientation that our role as teachers doesn’t make us any more comfortable with first days than we might be otherwise. Instead, it might make us more expectant; after all, we stand before students every year (or every semester) in the position of authority – knowledge is power, and on the first day of school teachers have the knowledge and students sit at our mercy. So maybe that’s the lesson of Orientation. First of all, that privilege is unavoidable. Somebody has to know what’s going on (some of my colleagues might refute that that describes me), and the rest have to be there to find space to move from passive to active participation. So maybe this thought will allow us to empathize with students a little bit more come August or September, when they fill our classrooms and look to us with varying degrees of eagerness and dread. We know they have questions, because we do. We know they have fears; we do too. But we know they can find their way, and it’s our job to help them do it, from the first day.