Writing Uconn

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situs bandarqIn the late 80s when the Aetna Endowment and the Aetna Chair of Writing were established in the English Department at UConn, the state legislature named the Connecticut Writing Project a Center for Excellence, a title that was used for many years for marketing purposes but eventually fell into disuse. Being a Center for Excellence is not the same as being a University Academic Center such as the UConn Writing Center, but somehow the similar titles caused confusion, and so at the end of the Spring semester in 2009 I received an email from our Provost’s Office informing me that I had to conduct a five-year aktivitas review of the CWP in order for it to be reauthorized as an academic center. Worse, the email said that if no previous review had been performed, the new review had to cover the aktivitas since its inception. For us, that was 1982. To make a long story short, I complied, spending most of my so-called August vacation producing a concise but thorough 22-page document. When I proudly submitted this to the provost’s office that fall, I was informed that I never should have had to conduct a review because the CWP was not an academic center.

Such is bureaucracy.

But all was not lost. The silver lining is that the data I collected taught me a tremendous amount about my own program. Furthermore, the National Writing Project celebrated its 35th anniversary in 2009, and as part of their anniversary celebration, they initiated the Site Early History Project, which is an effort to collect personal narratives and data from the oldest of the 209 NWP sites around the country, particularly those that can trace their histories to the years prior to the arrival of federal funding in 1991. Along with the New York and Boston sites, the CWP at UConn is one of the oldest sites in the northeast, and we will be celebrating our 30th anniversary next year. At this year’s Annual Meeting, I’ll be participating in a panel titled Study the History of Your Site or State Network.

Last fall, to supplement the research I had already done, I asked my undergraduate writing intern Ben Miller to begin collecting narratives from Teacher Consultants, particularly from the 1980s. I have asked this year’s intern, Jessica Mihaleas, to continue this work, but I also asked her to begin another project that built upon some of the discoveries I made writing my ill-fated aktivitas review.

One of the questions on the guidelines the Provost’s Office sent me asked to catalogue the research and publications produced by our Center. Now the CWP does not produce traditional academic scholarship, but we have always published the writing and research of teachers, and I had dozens of old journals lining the shelves of my office that I had never even looked at. When I began wading through these, I made all sorts of discoveries.

Of course I had copies of every issue of Connecticut Student Writers going back to 1982. Some from the earliest years listed former high school English teacher and author Wally Lamb as one of the readers and editors. I also found chapbooks of teacher writing from every Summer Institute, as well as from the Summer Institutes held at UConn-Stamford before that site spun off and went to Fairfield University. But I also found Teaching Assistants Training Seminar journals from 1986-1988. Unbeknownst to me, the CWP had provided some of the pelatihan for the English graduate students preparing to teach Freshman English, and had also published their writing, as has always been done with the Summer Institute TCs. I even found writing by both of the grad assistants who taught my English 105 and 109 classes in 1987-88.

I also found all the old copies of Writing UConn, the predecessor of the now-nationally acclaimed undergraduate literary magazine Long River Review, dating back to 1983. Within these I discovered writing by Jon Andersen, Denise Abercrombie, and Ken Cormier, to name a few, from their undergraduate years. All are good friends of mine and all are veteran teachers at this point, and Jon and Denise have both completed the Summer Institute in recent years.

So I put Jessica to work cataloguing these publications, and a snapshot of Jessica’s work can be viewed in a display case in the lobby of the Dodd Center. It documents the interrelationships among the CWP, the Aetna Chair of Writing, the Freshman English Program, the University Writing Center, and the Creative Writing Program to publish the writing of public school teachers, K-12 students, undergraduate students, and graduate students in publications such as Writing UConn, the Long River Review, Connecticut Student Writers, Teacher, Writer, and Essay Connections, as well as in the various short-lived and unnamed journals that published teacher research or the creative writing of the graduate students pelatihan to teach Freshman English.

I should also point out that the four writing programs in the English Department, with the participation of the Aetna Chair of Writing, have recently launched a new web portal page for our programs that can be found at www.writing.uconn.edu. Right now this portal is little more than just that—a portal. But as we move forward, we plan to add links to information, and to maybe digitize the old publications from the 1980s and 1990s so that they can be downloaded or viewed as pdfs.

I hope to see some of you tomorrow night at the Aetna Awards.