Summer Institute Reunion and Professional Development Meeting

On Thusday 9-22-11 two events took place in room 419 of Fretwell Hall at UNCC: a reunion of several 2011 Summer Institute  participants and a professional development meeting involving many of those same 2011 Summer Institute (new TC’s) as well as TC’s from at least 5 different years of the program!

What would a Summer Institute meeting be without a chance to write into the day? Or, rather, into the evening as we began around 5pm. We responded to Marge Piercy’s poem The Low Road before a bit of a “shake down.”

We wandered through small bits of red tape and reflected back on the summer while thinking ahead to our own classrooms. I always love how a “theme” starts to develop, even if one wasn’t originally planned. Don’t you find that that happens in your own writing? For this evening of the UNCC Writing Project the overarching message was Mapping.

One activity was to draw maps of our classrooms and schools. We were then to map out where writing could be found for student’s as well as teachers. We overlayed a transparency that allowed us to draw connections between where writing circulates in our classrooms and schools. I found myself asking who are the audiences for the work that my student’s create? What about my own writing? Should I share it with students?

This description just touches the tip (or perhaps compass) or the Map and the connections we are making as teachers, writers, and TC”s. We finished off our meeting by looking at the UNCC Writing Project map projects to see where we might belong.

At 6pm the other TC’s joined our group. We had a chance to get to know each other before pizza, snacks, and traveling around to “Choose Your Own Adventure” stations which were geared towards developing programs for upcoming camps, spring conferences, and fund raising ventures for the UNCC Writing Project (see – I told you there would be more maps).

It was wonderful to be around many of my 2011 Summer Institute TC’s and I felt that I was brought in to the larger Writing Project community by meeting participants from previous years as we all tried to tackle what we could do to map out creative writing ventures for our students, fellow teachers, and ourselves as writers.

I can’t wait for the next trip.