Nwp Radio

Leading up to the 2016 Presidential Election, youth from across the country published their opinions at Letters to the Next President 2.0, sharing their thoughts on the issues and topics that matter to them most. Listen as we talk with teacher-leaders from several Writing Project sites about the ways they engaged with this project and what they learned about supporting this kind of civic participation and connected learning in their contexts.

In celebration of the National Day on Writing, we visited with award-winning poet Jimmy Santiago Baca; family activist and co-director of the Family Story Project Mia Birdsong; and writer/educator Brian Mooney, along with some of Brian's students.

This episode of NWP Radio highlights a special collaboration between artist Rick Shaefer, the Fairfield University Art Museum, teachers who attended CWP-Fairfield's 2016 Invitational Leadership Institute, and Ubuntu Academy, a young adult literacy lab for immigrant and refugee youth.

NWP staff discuss what's in the air this fall, covering topics like writing in response to this year's presidential campaign, writing arguments in school and out, writing in times of violence, and the power and promise of the poetic voice, and discussing what to expect at the 2016 NWP Annual Meeting.

Student civic-action projects facilitate project-based learning, while illuminating and supporting the incredible capacity of young people to work together to tackle problems and improve their community. Listen to our conversation with Steve Zemelman, author of From Inquiry to Action and director of the Illinois Writing Project, and Liz Robbins, the Chicago teacher whose work inspired the book.

How can art and creative expression help us cope with and heal from trauma? NWP Radio talked with Roy Fox, author of Facing the Sky: Composing Through Trauma in Word and Image, who argues that personal writing is valuable both because of it helps students build critical thinking and composition skills, and because it helps them come to terms with trauma.

Cynthia Urbanski, author of Untangling Urban Middle School Reform, discusses her work with Writing Project professional development at Rosa Parks Middle School, focusing on the clash between competing narratives of student success.

Amidst policy calls for increasing a focus on argument in standards and assessment, it's easy to forget that teaching and learning argument is a complex, social, fascinating, and multifaceted proposition. In this episode of NWP Radio, the authors and educators behind the book Teaching and Learning Argumentative Writing in High School English Language Arts Classroomsdiscuss what they learned by diving into that complexity through long-term case studies of effective teaching of argument in diverse school settings.

Two hundred years after Mary Shelley came up with the vision for the story that would become Frankenstein, Arizona State University (ASU), National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), Chabot Space and Science Center and Creative Nonfiction magazine launched a series of writing 'dares' to inspire the public to imagine new stories about science, technology, and the impact of creations. Listen to our conversation with leaders of this project.

Writing Project directors, classroom teachers, and museum educators talk about the power of partnering formal and informal educators to think together about teaching and learning at the intersections of science and literacy.

Facing History and Ourselves sponsors Facing History Together contests to offer educators, students, and Facing History alumni the opportunity to tell stories, bring ideas to life, and build conversations about the issues that matter most - and share them across districts, states, and countries. We spoke to Laura Tavares, from Facing History and Ourselves, about this year's contest, and heard from a number of winning student essayists. The contests challenge participants to share experiences from inside and outside of the classroom, make connections between history and the moral choices we confront in today's world, and think about the world in a new way. Winning entries come in a variety of styles and media but all inspire us to envision a society free of racism, antisemitism, bullying, and hatred of all kinds.

How can teachers integrate inquiry-based research approaches with digital reading and writing in the classroom? This is the question that Dawn Reed and Troy Hicks explore in their 2016 book, Research Writing Rewired: Lessons that Ground Students' Digital Learning. We talked with the authors about strategies, lessons, tools, and principles for supporting connected learning in the English Language Arts classroom.

Hear from educators who are designing ways to connect to Letters to the Next President 2.0 over the summer through local institutes, youth writing camps, and online events. The conversation touches on how we might design now in support of youth participation via Letters to the Next President 2.0 in our classrooms this coming Fall.

Educators from NWP's College-Ready Writers Program (CRWP), who participated in an online version of a lesson study of two CRWP mini-units, talk about how the structure of the lesson study has impacted their practice, their experience with teaching the mini-units in their classrooms, and their experience with participating in the online community.

We celebrated National Poetry Month (April) by inviting the 2015 class of National Student Poets to talk about poetry and their year of service as literary ambassadors, as well as read some of their original work.

We introduce listeners to ARNA, the Action Research Network of the Americas, and learn about their history and current work, including their upcoming 2016 conference in Knoxville, TN that NWP teachers and researchers are invited to attend.

We were joined by three teacher-leaders from NWP's College-Ready Writers Program (CRWP) for a discussion about Extended Research Argument and its role in empowering students to be positive, active, solution-oriented citizens. Our guests also talked about the CRWP resources developed to teach argument writing.

The leaders from Red Clay Writing Project and Deep Center—recipient of the National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award—joined us for a conversation about their ongoing relationship and how we all might work together in order to create the richest learning ecosystems for all young people by joining forces inside and outside of schools, across organizations and learning institutions.

Sixteen-year-old Katie Eder, founder of Kids Tales—and one of the International Literacy Association's inaugural 30 Under 30 Literacy Champions—shared her organization's origin story with NWP Radio and her goals for expansion until "every kid is a published writer."

We interview the authors and editors of Teaching Outside the Box But Inside the Standards: Making Room for Dialogue about feeling caught between mandates to teach to standards, and the needs and interests of the students right in front of them, and how they teachers manage those tensions with deliberative practice, writing, and a professional community.