by Diane Waff
I was a teacher in the school district of Philadelphia for over 17 years, working primarily with Black, Asian, and Latino students from underserved sections of the city. For 12 of those years I worked at Olney High School. My career as a reflective practitioner began at Olney High and, although I had taught in other schools, this was the place where I began to see myself as a professional. I became more self-reflective, studied the literature on literacy teaching and learning, conducted school and classroom research studies, and opened myself to a world beyond the classroom door. The story of reform at Olney and my own professional growth is really the story of the Philadelphia Writing Project and the context it created for a group of HS teachers who through engagement with PhilWP, learned to reflect on their knowledge, experiences and questions as members of an inquiry community. We came to understand that knowledge generated by teacher practice has the power to make schools more enabling places for everyone– teachers as well as students. It was the indispensable role the inquiry community played in raising our voices as teachers and giving us the confidence to chart new directions in the restructuring efforts that took place in our school that is at the heart of my budding involvement in PhilWP.
The transformation of life at my high school and a newly discovered sense of self efficacy among the teachers began with the district’s efforts to restructure and reculture the city’s comprehensive high schools. The road to empowerment and professional transformation began when I, along with several teachers from my high school, joined the Philadelphia Writing Project’s Seminar in Teaching and Learning. The seminar, which began in 1988, was designed to engage teachers in rethinking school governance structures, educational practices and school culture. We met twice a month after school with thirty-five colleagues from neighboring high schools to talk about teaching and learning in our classrooms and schools. Over the six-year life of the seminar, the entire school community was influenced by the work of the growing number of teachers who participated in the yearlong seminar, many of whom participated year after year.
During the seminar we read Paulo Freire, Ira Shor, Boll Bigelow, Linda Christensen, Lisa Delpit, Bob Fecho, Joan Cone, Shirley Brown and university based scholars and researchers. Their work inspired me to experiment with different methods of teaching. At the end of each seminar session, I had motivation and resolve to move beyond the skills-based curriculum that discouraged my students from making meaningful connections between their life experiences and course content. The seminar helped me see inequalities in schooling and the role schools play in reproducing social stratification. Through this experience, I developed a critical consciousness and a belief in myself as a leader. I came to understand that having an awareness of “what works for whom, under what circumstance, and in what ways” ( Lytle, et al., 1994, p. 22) is essential to acting proactively and “making problematic the current arrangements of schooling; the ways knowledge is constructed, evaluated, and used; and teachers individual and collective roles in bringing about change” ( Cochran-Smith & Lytle 1999, p. 291). I could feel my sense of agency grow in the Seminar and I imagined I could play a role in bringing about positive change. By the third year of the Seminar, I attended PhilWP’s Invitational Summer Institute. Known for placing a high value on teacher leadership and teacher inquiry, PhilWP lived up to the words of NWP founder Jim Gray:
Let me try to state the principle more fully and accurately: It is that the most reliable and credible solutions to the problems of learning and teaching that face classroom teachers and their students are to be found in the reservoir of wisdom and practical knowledge that is constituted by the collective knowledge in the possession of experienced and successful classroom teachers themselves. Thus, the writing project looks to experienced and successful classroom teachers as the best resource available to the educational community for solving the academic problems that trouble us. Teachers are, in other words, not seen as a source of the problem but as the principal resource for the solution (as quoted in Blau).
I was struck by how this view of leadership differed so dramatically from the top down views expressed by so many administrators in the district. Through my professional learning experiences with PhilWP, I observed teachers in the writing project leading often in collaboration with others, not by dictating but by fostering partnerships and facilitating inquiry about ways to bring the community together to solve difficulties and dilemmas. This ethos has continued to inform my work, leading me on a journey which has included multiple leadership roles in PhilWP and in the NWP.
References
Blau, S. (1999). The only thing new under the sun: 25 years of the National Writing Project. National Writing Project Quarterly, 21(3). https://archive.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/804
Cochran-Smith, M. & Lytle, S. (1999). Relationships of knowledge and practice: Teacher learning in communities. Review of Research in Education, 24, 249-306. American Educational Research Association.
Lytle, S.L., Christman, J., Countryman, J., Fecho,B., Portnoy, D. & Scion, F. (1994). Learning in the afternoon: When teacher inquiry meets school reform. In M. Fine (Ed.), Chartering urban school reform: Reflections on public high schools in the midst of change. Teachers College Press.
Writers Who Care 