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Leadership in Action

Access, Relevance, Diversity

Project Outreach

The Project Outreach Network is:

  • a network of sites in the National Writing Project
  • a three-year process of site development with equity as a focus
  • a commitment to improving education for children in low-income communities
  • a commitment to teachers, to their knowledge and abilities
  • a network of colleagues across the country.
Goals of Project Outreach
The Project Outreach Network was founded with the goal of extending the quality and quantity of National Writing Project services to teachers in low-income communities. In Project Outreach, sites study their service area to learn more about strengths and needs of various communities and to identify ways that their writing project can be a part of those communities. We share three objectives:

  • to increase the number of teachers of low-income youth participating in sustained professional development at Writing Project sites -access;
  • to increase the quality of services provided by Writing Project sites, by improving the professional development they offer and by making it more relevant to teachers in low-income communities – relevance;
  • to increase the quality of programs conducted by Writing Project sites by increasing the racial, ethnic and linguistic diversity in project leadership so that teacher knowledge can more closely reflect the cultural and ethnic diversity of the local community – diversity.

Member Sites
When sites join the Project Outreach Network, they are expected to form a local leadership team willing to assess the site’s strengths and challenges related to objectives above. The local leadership team will work together for three years.

For the first two years, the team leads a site-level inquiry into the nature of its work with teachers in low-income communities, developing programs and initiatives in response to what it is learning. In the third year, member sites focus on what lessons they have learned from their work that can be shared with the larger NWP community, deepening our national conversations about professional development, about inquiry, and about our work with teachers and children. To support this three-year process, Project Outreach organizes two one-week national summer institutes – one for each of the first two years of site work – and provides small grants to support local work.

PON Background Information
In 1995, the DeWitt Wallace – Reader’s Digest Fund awarded a grant to the National Writing Project to support an initial network of 18 sites interested in extending the quality and quantity of National Writing Project services to teachers in low-income communities. This network, called the Project Outreach Network, was built on a belief in the tremendous capacities of all our children and a commitment to extending a professional development community to their teachers. As members of Project Outreach, each of the 18 sites undertook a three-year program of site-level inquiry, program development and action research with an emphasis on equity and diversity in writing project work. Teachers and directors from these 18 sites are now ready to welcome new members into the network. As a result of the impact and success of Project Outreach, the National Writing Project is expanding the network to support a second cohort of 6 – 8 sites. Each site would work to strengthen its local programs, to share and reflect with sites nationally, and to help the NWP as a whole think about the issues at the core of Project Outreach.

Oakland Writing Project and Project Outreach

History/Demographics
Oakland (MI) Writing Project submitted a proposal in 2000 to participate in the second Project Outreach cohort.  At the time, our site was 20 years old.  The site director at the time, a white female, had been the director for the past 10 years. The site leadership was primarily white female.  We had nearly 400 teacher consultants (teachers who had attended the summer institute); however only 50 were active and less than 40 were actively engaged in site-sponsored leadership.

Our site serves 28 school districts ranging from urban to suburban to rural.  We have 12,000 K-12 teachers and approximately 210,000 students, about one-tenth of our state’s school age population.  The population of our service area is 1.2 million and is extremely diverse in terms of race, culture, language, and socio-economic status.  There are as many as 50 different home languages spoken by students within the service area.  The total minority student population in the service area is 22%; however, minority populations tend to be concentrated in only 3 of the 28 districts—Southfield, Oak Park and Pontiac.

We were accepted into the second Project Outreach Network (PON). The original PON proposal was intended to allow our site to in-service teachers in the Hamtramck and Pontiac school districts.  However, we very quickly realized that Project Outreach was about making changes in our leadership.  These changes would enable us to have the capacity to reach out and better serve teachers of low income and minority students.  We needed to make our programs more accessible to teachers, make the content of our programs more relevant to these teachers, and to have diversity in leadership and program content.  So, our PON journey began with the other seven sites selected in the second PON cohort—Philadelphia, San Diego, Sicangu (South Dakota), Brownsville (Texas) Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Las Vegas Writing Projects.

Our Local Leadership Team
To best realize the goals of Project Outreach, individual sites formed LocalLeadership Teams. The original Local Leadership Team of the Oakland Writing Project included a diverse group of experienced educators who dedicated themselves to promoting inclusion and diversity at the site. The local team benefited from meeting with other teams at national conferences sharing resources and supporting one another. I was the team’s site coordinator. I am an African American female who teaches Marketing Education teacher at Southfield High School and I attended the OWP’s summer invitational in 1988.   The other original team members were Bessie Burden, an African American sixth grade Language Arts and Social Studies teacher at Birney Middle School also in Southfield; Linda Harrington, an African American who, was at that time, an administrator in the Hamtramck school district; Kathy King, a Language Arts teacher at Madison Middle School in Pontiac; Richard Koch, who teaches writing and the teaching of writing at Adrian College; Kathleen Kryza, a consultant for Huron Valley Schools, and Dr. Laura Roop, our directorfrom the University of Michigan.  Laura Schiller joined the team when she became a director.  Patricia Bellinger-Chun, the parent youth community coordinator and social worker at Arthur Ashe Academy in Southfield, replacedKathleen Kryza. Linda Harrington had to resign due to family and health concerns and was replaced by Ayanna Yearby, a math teacher a Southfield-Lathrup High School

Our Work
At first glance, the eight PON II sites appeared to be very different.  However, as we began to talk and work together, we discovered by examining our sites from various perspectives that most shared a common problem.  We all had site leadership that  was not reflective of the general population in our service area.  Some confessed their writing projects  OWP were run like country clubs.  They only “let-in “ or invited to the summer invitational teachers who they knew personally because they worked in the same schools, lived in the same neighborhoods or looked and spoke just like them.  It took a year for most sites to realize that hard conversations about race and class were going to have to take place in order to begin the change process.

Impact On Our Site
Our serious commitment to the goals of Project Outreach is reflected in the changes we have already made within.  For the past two summers (2003 and 2004) we have added an African American co-facilitator to our Summer Invitational.  The content of the institute has been modified to include a social justice focus.

In addition, during the summer of 2004, we offered a one week Advanced Institute.(do you want to comment more on the AI?  Who attended?  Were the goals attained?  This institute also included a social justice strand and one of the co-facilatators was African American.

Continuity projects are scheduled for the 2004-2005 school year.  Guest speakers and books relating to social justice in the classroom will be discussed.

The Future
Even though our official involvement with Project Outreach has ended, our site leadership is committed to the goals of Project Outreach.  We feel strongly that all teachers in our service area should have access to our services.  We also feel that the services provided should be relevant to all teachers in our service area.  Finally, we are committed to having racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity in all site leadership positions.  These commitments will not always be easily turned into realities; however, dedication to these goals will force us to always self-monitor and adjust as necessary.

This special edition of Élan is devoted to communicating our Project Outreach journey to our stakeholders.  These modifications, although not earth shattering, were often very difficult to implement.  We at OWP realize that meaningful change is difficult can often be painful.  However, these changes are necessary. Some of the programs mentioned in the articles are directly sponsored by OWP.  Others are programs or services provided independently by OWP teacher consultants or by their respective school districts.  These programs are, however, designed and conducted in harmony with the goals of Project Outreach.

We feel our efforts are crucial to transforming our Writing Project site into one that is now more viable and dynamic and, therefore, better able to survive the 21st Century by being more accessible, relevant and diverse.  We are committed to be being a site that is able to service teachers of not only the “haves” but also the “have-nots”.

Please feel free to contact either of our directors or me (Sylvia Bailey at Sylvia.Bailey@sbcglobal.net, Laura Roop at laurroop@umich.edu, or Laura Schiller  Laura.Schiller@oakland.k12.mi.us,if you have any comments or questions.

Thank you.

Sylvia M. Bailey
Co-Director Oakland Writing Project