Upcoming Penn State Institute Offers a Retreat for Teachers Who Want to Write

by Joe Savrock (March 2010)

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Teachers aspiring to write about teaching and life in schools are encouraged to register for a new professional development institute at Penn State. The Institute in Professional Writing for Teachers, scheduled June 21–25, 2010, is designed to help teachers prepare a professional article for publication.

The weeklong Institute is led by two Penn State faculty members experienced in the support of teacher-writers: Anne Whitney and Bernard Badiali. The event offers a retreat-like university setting for K–12 teachers who would like time and space to dedicate to their own writing.

The Institute’s retreat-like setting will allow participants to focus on and develop their own work, with one-to-one consulting from the Institute’s organizers. Activities will include support in choosing a target publication and considering audience, revision and editing strategies—as well as blocks of uninterrupted time in which to write. The participants will have an opportunity to reflect on and share their work with other teachers, receiving several rounds of feedback from peers and the Institute faculty.

Whitney has been conducting extensive research on the development of teachers as writers. “Focusing on our own writing as teachers brings an added benefit of allowing us to more effectively teach writing,” she says. “By working on writing of their own, teachers of writing can meet their students as fellow practitioners of a challenging but worthwhile art.”

Badiali’s teaching and research have been focused on creating equitable school and university partnerships that join the wisdom of practitioners with the wisdom of practice. “I have long held that teachers’ voices have been conspicuously silent and that their perspective for keeping sense and humanity in the policy discourse has been too muted,” he says.

Whitney observes that teachers are an underrepresented segment in the authorship of articles in professional journals. “Teachers can and should make their voice be heard in publications,” she says. “Too often, the voices of teachers have been left out of the important public conversations about education that concern them, and that is wrong.”

By completing this program, educators may earn hours toward fulfilling Act 48 requirements. Educators should confirm that the program fits their respective school district's professional development plan for Act 48. For additional information, visit www.outreach.psu.edu/info/act48

For registration information, please visit www.outreach.psu.edu/programs/writing-for-teachers/