Principles, Practices, Processes: Nurturing a Writing Project Site through Changing Times

by Troy Hicks

On a June afternoon, in the summer of 2010, my personal and professional life connected for just a few, beautiful moments, as my daughter shared her writing with me during our first writers camp, offered through the Chippewa River Writing Project at Central Michigan University. Just moments earlier, I had been preparing teachers to speak with our youth writers and — as the children arrived — my daughter gravitated immediately to me, notebook in hand, and ready to share a draft she had just composed in Google Docs. 

The Chippewa River Writing Project (CRWP), funded in 2008 with our first summer institute in 2009, I like to say, was also born on my birthday, November 10. That was the day that NWP’s Executive Director, Sharon Washington, called to let me know that our site had been funded. The next few months were spent planning and organizing our first invitational in 2009 and, soon after that, plans for 2010 began to emerge, with the opportunity for an elementary writing camp to be added to our programming. 

In planning our 2010 summer institute, we ensured that our youth camp would take place at the same time, allowing the teachers who had joined us that summer to serve as good listeners and responders for our elementary campers. The wheels of the annual cycle of work for CRWP had begun to turn, and our emerging leadership team was starting to find a rhythm to the grant-related work. With university and NWP support, CRWP had a healthy launch and was beginning its second year of robust programming. 

It was in this moment that I found myself surrounding my teachers, who had agreed to give up four weeks of their summer, with children who chose to be part of a week-long writing camp. Of course, I knew that my daughters were there at camp that week, as we — Lexi, her step-sister McKenna, and me — had been staying in a dorm, eating in the cafeteria, and enjoying time together on campus. As children began to pair off with the teachers to share their writing, Lexi immediately moved toward me and, as much as I would like to have encouraged her to find another trusting adult to provide her with insights on her writing, she indeed chose me. 

This picture shows us looking at her work on screen, words that had been breathed into life on the pages of her journal earlier in the week, and — just moments earlier — typed into a Google Doc in the computer lab downstairs, ready to be shared. We are sitting side-by-side, elbow-to-elbow, in a conversation like one of the hundreds I have had with students in my years as a writing center consultant and as a teacher of writing. Yet, in this moment, I was also a father, listening to my own child share her writing and seeking both approval and constructive criticism, awaiting just the right combination of expression and spoken words to know that I see value in her writing, and in her as a writer. 

This moment, for me as a teacher and father, is one that remains a guiding vision for me as a writing project site director. Though we are unable to still offer these kinds of programs each summer due to changes in NWP funding, university support, and other factors, my hope is that — for any teacher who attends our programs — they are able to carry these principles and practices back to their own classrooms, schools, and communities. 

They listen. 

They empathize. 

They respond. 

Teachers of writing are now called the “first responders in our students’ emotional lives,” and I am reminded of the critical role that they play for our students as I reflect on this picture. There are moments in our personal and professional lives where everything seems to “click,” where we find that we are in exactly the right place at the right time, and this was one of them. 

Yet, recalling this moment with my daughter in 2010, it is still impossible to think about what would soon happen in Congress, when the NWP’s funding was eradicated, and the possibility of providing a stipend to teachers to attend a full, four-week summer institute or facilitate a youth camp would soon evaporate. We have struggled with funding and participation over the intervening years.

Still, CRWP — like many other NWP sites — perseveres. This spring, we are preparing to celebrate our 15th year. 

While our work at CRWP has not always fit into the model of NWP sites that I had learned about in my own, early days of becoming a Teacher Consultant and site leader (especially as school year demands necessitate that teachers disconnect in the summer, taking a well-deserved respite from all things school-related), my goal has always been to create a welcoming community for my K-12 colleagues. In the summer, during the school year; in person and online; near or far, CRWP and the spirit of collaboration and community remains. 

Though we no longer have a regular presence with youth camps or the invitational summer institute of old, we do still have our CRWP community. It ebbs and flows, it shrinks and grows. Yet, it remains an amazing, dedicated, caring group of colleagues with a core leadership team. Teachers from CRWP have gone on to leadership roles in the Michigan Council of Teachers of English and the Michigan Reading Association, and have led presentations at those state-level events as well as the National Council of Teachers of English. We continue to earn grants, and provide professional development. We pivoted to online summer institutes in 2020 and 2021. We have regular events at CMU’s Biological Station on Beaver Island. And, even as I write these words, I am also working on another grant proposal to fund CRWP work. 

Like all NWP colleagues, in short, we continue to write, learn, and lead, going public with our practice. 

And, yet, the core of NWP work remains — just like this one moment with my daughter reminds me — where we enact guiding principles in our teaching practices as well as our writing processes: we listen to learn, we write to understand, and we nurture one another as a professional community. 

Dr. Troy Hicks is a professor of English and education at Central Michigan University, where he serves as Chair of the Department of Teacher and Special Education and directs the Chippewa River Writing Project.