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, January 25, 2025: Workshop #3: Writing Strategies for Language Development
In-Person Event
Classrooms are filled with students who are linguistically and culturally diverse. These workshops will explore language features and support language production for all learners. Teachers will experience rich language writing strategies and tools to provide targeted instruction for various levels of language fluency.
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 #3: Writing Strategies for Language Development
- $80.00 Register for the Weekend Workshop Series (4 sessions)
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
Ain't No Mountain High Enough-Overcoming Challenges in Adolescent Literacy through Strategic Writing Instruction
With a growing trend of more and more adolescent learners entering secondary education without foundational writing skills, many teachers are facing the dilemma of how to incorporate intervention into the high pressure content needs of the middle and high school classroom. In this presentation, we will go over strategies that support adolescent learners, with a particular lens on multilingual learners, to engage in much-needed intervention that can be integrated across content areas. Presentation will also include student work samples and voice to highlight ways students themselves saw their growth through use of these strategies in a real life middle school classroom.
Brianna Dupper is a pacific northwest transplant that has laid roots down across California. She has worn and continues to wear many hats in education, including instructional coach, reading interventionist, elementary educator, and her current comfy headwear, middle school educator. When not in the classroom, you can find her doing union work, at the public library, or somewhere outside with her dog and husband, exploring all the incredible nature the bay area has to offer.
Session 1
9:45-11:00
Building the Brick-and-Mortar for Multilingual Learners in the Elementary Classroom
Elementary teachers (in bilingual or not) are facing an increasing multilingual population, and with district demands oftentimes centered around mathematics and increasingly, the science of reading, writing can feel like a forgotten area for teacher professional development and learning. In this workshop, we will explore a few concrete strategies for elementary teachers to use in their classroom to support a diverse range of writers. These strategies are based on the theoretical framework of GLAD (Guided Language Acquisition by Design), a set of research-based instructional strategies designed as best practices to support all learners, particularly multilingual, newcomer students. The workshop will include demos of the strategies and collaborative debrief(s), as well as modifications I have incorporated in my particular English/Spanish dual-language classroom setting as well as discussions about how participants have used and/or would modify the presented strategies in their particular educational contexts.
Perry Shane SIniard is a bilingual educator who was raised by God-fearing Southern women and a heaping amount of biscuits and gravy. Perry currently works as a bilingual 4th grade teacher in the Mission District, at Buena Vista Horace Mann (K-8) within San Francisco Unified School District. He is currently working on a series of short stories about growing up queer in Appalachia, and can often be found weightlifting, rock climbing, or biking in his free time. As a proud member of BAWP's "Golden Cohort", Perry is incredibly passionate about how to develop writing and metalanguage in the upper elementary classroom, particularly in a multilingual, urban setting.
Session 2
11:15-12:30
The Multiverse of Writing: Language Writing Strategies for Poetry
What is a “language writing strategy,” that is, something that incorporates the specificity, history, and cultural context of a second language into English writing? It’s not uncommon for multilingual writers to incorporate untranslated or transliterated language into their writing to impart the flavor of the writer's language of origin. But just as often it does very little to do more than create linguistic ambience. This workshop will look at the production of poetry through the incorporation of a foreign language into verse written mainly in English, as a way of multiplying the meaning and imaginative experiences. We think of language acquisition as a one-way street where a student gets “better” at English by improving grammar and usage. But how can a poet improve their writing through a “language writing strategy” that goes in two or three directions from English back into another language, enriching the writing and opening up new ways of thinking and perceiving? This workshop focuses on poetry shaped or inflected by verses incorporated from a second language.
Dr. Jeffrey Neil Anderson teaches regular writing workshops and coaches one-on-one in poetry, short story/novel, personal essay, and playwriting. After teaching at UC Berkeley and UC Davis for over a decade, Jeffrey went on to develop curricula for international students at TAL Education (Beijing, China), incorporating the study of literature, history, literary history, public speech and debate, and writing. He regularly teaches workshops for The New York Times contests in journalistic writing. Jeffrey is currently working on a series of essays that blend memoir and scholarly research, How Sea Monsters Make You Better. Jeffrey holds higher degrees from Yale, Cambridge University, the Graduate Theological Union, and UC Berkeley.
Session 2
11:15-12:30
What is my linguistic history
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 will be given to instances of language shift ( loss), maintenance, and/or revival, and how the process of learning a language informs our identity.
Luz Salazar has been a Spanish bilingual elementary educator for over 25 years and a Summer 2020 BAWP fellow participant. She currently works as a 5th grade Bilingual teacher and mentor in a dual immersion program at Melrose Leadership Academy in Oakland. With the support of BAWP Luz coordinated the Indigenous Language Institute, and facilitated a Summer workshop series at CREA/ Nicaragua Summer 2024.