Writer, Teacher, Person: Tensions between Personal and Professional Writing in a National Writing Project Summer Institute.

Abstract

notion that of writing must also write has been pervasive since the 1970s. But what should they write? On this question, the consensus has been less clear. In the National Writing Project (NWP), a professional network focused on the improvement of writing instruction and featuring summer institutes in which teachers engage in writing of their own as well as demonstrations of effective teaching practices, tradition has usually favored personal writing, particularly memoir, poetry, and fiction. This emphasis on personal writing has, at times, left the NWP vulnerable to criticism that the writing occurring in its summer institutes is too self-focused, characterizing the personal or creative writing done by teachers during the summer as insufficiently focused on classroom problems and practice. In fact, professional writing has been a part of the writing teachers have engaged in at NWP summer institutes since 1974 (Healy, 1992, pp. 258-259), but the relative emphasis that NWP summer institutes should place on these two kinds of writing has been a point of friendly contention among those involved in NWP, with some NWP site directors arguing for the importance of personal writing, others requiring that teachers also undertake some professional writing, and still others going so far as to insist that most, if not all, writing at the summer institutes take up professional topics. This article redirects this conversation among NWP site directors about the respective roles that personal and professional writing should play toward more productive territory, demonstrating some aspects of the role of writing in professional development that spread beyond the NWP context to research and program development more generally. A case study of one teacher's experience during an NWP summer institute illustrates the dichotomy be