The Bay Area Writing Project is excited to provide high quality professional development opportunities at an affordable price for teachers throughout the Bay Area, led by practicing teachers who share techniques and strategies that work in their classrooms. This workshop series is perfect for teachers, administrators, coaches, coordinators, student teachers or anyone interested in the teaching of writing.
Open for Registration
Saturday, March 8, 2025: Workshop #4: Voice, Identity, Access
Virtual Event
Classrooms can provide courageous spaces for exploring collective and individual identities. Writing often plays a critical role in this exploration and provides a humanizing lens through which students can see each others’ experiences. These workshops will focus on strategies, protocols, and content that support all students to contribute their stories, share their truths, and invite others into conversation through writing.
Schedule:
Opening Remarks: 9:30 am
Session 1: 9:45 am - 11:00 am
Break: 11:00 am - 11:10 am
Session 2: 11:15 am - 12:30 pm
Registration:
- $25.00 Register for Workshop #4: Voice, Identity, Access
Discounts:
-- Groups of 3 or more get a 20% discount (must register at the same time and the discount automatically deducted during check out)
Session 1
9:45-11:00
Playing with Autoethnography to Build an Empowering Literacy Pedagogy
Literacy involves the ways we read, write and communicate to make meaning, individually and collectively, of the world around us. In this workshop, participants will explore and “play” with the genre of autoethnography to tap into the potential for literacy pedagogy to foster students’ personal and academic growth and deepen a sense of community. Grounded in the concepts of multiliteracies and critical socio-cultural knowledge and drawing upon research-based tools, this experience should leave teachers with an enhanced capacity to recognize, value, leverage and build-upon the contemporary literacies of the youth with whom they learn with and from.
Kevin Anderson is a PhD student at the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a former History teacher who has led racial equity initiatives at public, charter and private schools in the SF Bay Area. He currently investigates how teachers conceptualize and implement culturally sustaining pedagogy in racially diverse secondary classrooms, the learning ecologies of social-justice oriented teacher education, the implementation of ethnic studies in California and shifting articulations of racial justice. Kevin is a graduate of UC Berkeley, Harvard Law School and STEP. He is also the author of a children’s book H2O Around the World.
Session 1
9:45-11:00
Writing as a Path to Access and Connection
Writing can be an invitation to exploration and learning. In this workshop, we will explore how to introduce concepts through creative writing, along with strategies for sharing and building on each other’s ideas. The workshop will focus on a math lesson, but we will also discuss how these strategies can be applied across different disciplines.
Geeta Makhija has been a middle school math teacher for over 20 years and a summer 2024 BAWP fellow participant. She is constantly learning, reflecting, and honing her craft. Geeta has driven across the nation many times, working in different schools, but always returns to her favorite place, the Bay Area. Geeta enjoys books, writing, theater, work, friends, and family. Her most favorite joy is celebrating the never-ending, infinite powers of Pi on Pi Day every March 14th.
Session 2
11:15-12:30
Mentoring Students with Disabilities to Develop a Writer Identity
When it comes to equity, we as educators must also be sure that it is inclusive to individuals with disabilities as well. In this workshop, we will discuss ways on how mentorship through one-on-one conferences can be beneficial for all, especially for students with disabilities. We will also explore how conferencing can become a safe space for students to feel comfortable in expressing and sharing their ideas. Through re-defining in terms of how we view conferencing, it can thus become an accessible teaching method that will help students with disabilities to grow as writers.
Yume Kim is a poet, essayist, educator, and author of her debut poetry chapbook, entitled as Reserve the Right. In 2011, she moved from her home state Virginia to California for her graduate studies at San Francisco State University. There, she earned both an M.A. in English and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing. Additionally, she is a recipient of the following fellowships: Kundiman (June 2012), The Ruby Creatives in Residence (2022-2023), and The Bay AreaWriting Project Invitational Summer Institute (June 2024). Some of her works can also be found in the following journals: gesture, sPARKLE + bLINK, West Wind Review, Transfer, SugaredWater, Writing Without Walls, The Bangalore Review, You Might Need to Hear This, and TheSad Girls Lit Club. Yume currently still resides in San Francisco, where she tutors and teaches.
Session 2
11:15-12:30
Inquiry and Writing in Across the Curriculum
The phrase "we are all literacy teachers" was common in schools over the past decade, but more support is needed in order for teachers in any subject to meaningfully incorporate writing into the curriculum. At the same time, in this political and technological moment, the urgency for students to develop skills like analyzing source credibility, determining an author's perspective, making inter-text connections and tracking argument development has increased. In this session, we will review specific strategies and tools for embedding writing and text analysis into any classroom. Additionally, we will review the Inquiry Project, an adaptable cumulative project through which students generate a question, conduct research, write in multiple genres then execute a creative deliverable of their choice to teach their peers about what they learned."
Cami: I graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in Secondary English Education and a high school English teaching credential. I moved to San Francisco and began teaching at a flagship charter school of a new network called Alpha Public Schools. I taught 7th and 8th grade Humanities there for several years, then moved to another charter school in Oakland and taught 8th grade English. I then shifted into independent schools, teaching 7th and 8th grade English at Katherine Delmar Burke School for Girls for three school years, including the year of the Covid school closures. In the fall of 2022, I began working at Redwood Day School, where I have taught 7th and 8th grade History and English.