Session 1: 2021 BAWP Forum

2021 BAWP Forum: Welcome Participants!

This year our world as we knew it changed. For months now, shifts in our instructional contexts have led us to think more deeply and differently about our practice and, more than ever, about meeting the needs of our students. While holding on to our core values of equity and social justice, we are reaffirming what works in writing instruction—in any context—and innovating to meet the demands of the moment. This year’s Bay Area Writing Project Forum offers educators a place to share individual stories of what has reoriented and grounded us over this past year, and provides a time to share...

7. Asking the Right Question – the Critical Question

“Questions open a space in your mind that allow better answers to breathe.”
― Richard Norton

For so many of us – and our students -- the research paper is a millstone that we are all endlessly pushing uphill. Years ago, I started asking students what they would love to learn about and had a pretty good time setting them free to do just that. Teaching a community college composition course, “Critical Thinking,” was a challenge because so many of the papers I had been assigning became excellent reports sometimes with no critical thinking at all. I started to address this concern...

3. Student Journalists: Reporting on the Pandemic to Develop Empathy

The unit’s goal is to find similarities and cultivate connectedness as well as reflect on systematic differences regarding racism, classism, and other inequalities among experiences to cultivate empathy, without the dangerous othering effects. In order to reflect and begin to understand the coronavirus’ impact on society, students become active journalists, recording individual accounts and researching communities to ethically report the wide range of experiences, responses, and reactions to the pandemic. Students will compose two reports: Straight News and a Feature Story, which will...

6. What is Owed since 1619?

Working with the resources and commentary from the 1619 Project and Equal Justice Initiative, this workshop focuses on historiography, or the work of writing history based on the critical examination of sources. Participants will write arguments debating whether the federal government should pay Black Americans reparations for slavery.

Intended Audience: The information in this workshop is most applicable to high school English and Social Studies teachers, but could easily be adapted for use in middle school classrooms in which cross-disciplinary writing instruction and social...

5. Conscientization-Writing for Transformation

Using the Freirian concept of conscientization, teachers can facilitate writing where students critically explore pertinent topics named by students. Topics like racism, gentrification, immigration, education and others with embedded ways to address them head on. Students ask themselves: What is my reality and why is it what it is? What’s keeping me from joy, success, wellness ? How do I get there? As they begin to see systems and obstacles in their lives for what they are, they develop strategies and action plans to combat, and overcome them. They take advantage of their...

4. Nurturing Student Engagement: Interactive Digital Learning - Part 1 Pedagogy

Engaging students in this new pandemic world has never been more important nor more difficult. The topics will be covered in two workshops, one focused on pedagogy and one on praxis. With each focusing on building a safe nurturing, equity focused digital community that engages our students in deep meaningful learning, while balancing empathy and rigor. Utilizing a variety of digital tools; such as Google Classroom, Docs, Presentation, Sites, Flipgrid, Adobe Sparks, or padlet to break through the constraints of distance learning and focus on the unique opportunities for opening up student...

2. What is My Linguistic History?

What language (s) did my parents speak? What languages did my grandparents speak? In this workshop participants investigate and engage in producing a map of their linguistic histories tracing it back as far as they can, in order to become metacognitive about their own language and to value the language they use. Attendees will be provided with a brief history of bilingual education in the US, and language scaffolds for creating contexts for language learning. Participants will engage in reflection on how their family, institutions and peers have shaped their language(s). Close attention...

1. Author’s Chair in the Virtual Elementary Classroom

Young children are natural storytellers. They tell stories through their play, their art, and their conversations. Through these stories, young children process new information and new experiences in order to better understand themselves, their community, and their place in that community. This workshop will focus on how to support young children to develop the writing and metacognitive skills necessary to further develop these stories from stories in which they are processing their own experience into stories in which they are communicating what they understand to their...