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LSE Writer's Workshop: A Work in Progress

By Roseanna Almaee, Darton College

Georgia has a rich heritage of producing quality writers from the nationally famous like W. E. B. DuBois to Terry Kaye, Jimmy Carter, James Kilgo, Joel Chandler Harris, and Bailey White to the locally famous like Victor Miller, Ferrol Sams, and many others. So it is not unusual to find in myriad small towns throughout the south writers discussing their craft and dreaming of sharing that work with others.

When I moved to Albany, GA in 1993, I was immersed into this rich heritage of southern writers, and I began to gain a greater understanding for their heritage and work. Then in 1995, I was invited by a colleague to join a writers’ organization known as the Albany Writers’ Guild. This was a group of local citizens who worked together to craft their poetry, short stories, plays, and novels led by a gregarious, published author and English professor, Victor Miller. This comradeship of writers was my true introduction to the craft, but years later, another introduction helped me think in terms of my students.

In June 2005 and again in June 2006, I spent two wonderful months of intensive writing, sharing, and thinking about student’ writing while I participated in the Southwest Georgia Writing Project hosted by Georgia Southwestern State University. This group of creative educators from all grade levels and content areas and from many different schools was led by Dr. Peg Ellington, a published author and professor at the university. It was through the NWP group that I was challenged to see the teaching of writing in a different way, and when I began to think of a new version of the writer’s guild or writer’s workshop – something that I could do with my learning support students at the college level.

Writer’s workshops as presented in the National Writing Project model are mostly focused on public schools where teachers have access to their students on an almost daily basis over a period of several months. Teachers using the NWP model have the chance to work through a process with their students of discussing, writing, sharing or presenting, revising, and publishing. But I work at a community college as a director of a writing lab, so “my students” come and go at will, and I never get to work with them in the same way as the public school teachers. Also, all of the students coming to the Darton Writing Lab are there for help because they are in learning assistance classes and they are developmentally lagging in college readiness skills. We have a wonderful diagnostic/prescriptive methodology in the Writing Lab, but I wondered if I could use the writing workshop model to help reach these students in a different way.

This semester, with the support of my dean, Melanie Thornton, I started a Writer’s Workshop for the Learning Support English students. We meet every Wednesday afternoon for an hour, and we talk and write together. My goal is to change the perspective these students have of themselves. I observed that they saw themselves as non-writers just trying to get through a class and move on to college level courses. I want them to see themselves as Peter Elbow sees students - as writers with something to say – people who are not afraid to interact with the page and who can put thoughts on paper in a coherent and organized manner…and perhaps not be afraid to work on grammar and punctuation along the way. I want them to stop being afraid of writing and see the power of their own work.

We are in process - meeting every Wednesday – a small but determined group of students (and one willing lab director) who want to succeed and see the workshop as one more way to try.

I will let you know how we do.

References

Elbow, Peter. Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

National Writing Project. http://www.writingproject.org

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