National Writing Project and Google Team Up for Students’ Writing
|
Sharon J. Washington,
executive director of the National Writing Project |
By Sharon J. Washington
Students in middle school and high school are not waiting to reach voting
age to advise the next
president about issues that matter to them. We at the National Writing Project, in collaboration with the Google Docs team at Google, are pleased to have created a pathway for students’ advice and ideas.
We have teamed up to develop an online publishing project that allows young people from across the country, ages 13 to 18, to write about issues they want our next president to address and to publish their writing for a national audience. Letters to the Next President: Writing Our Future opened in early October and runs through Election Day. Students work with their teachers and their mentors to compose their persuasive pieces using a free Web-based collaborative writing tool, Google Docs, where they are motivated by the authentic audience of readers in the digital world. As of Oct. 20, the project has published more than 1,200 letters from students at more than 59 schools.
These letters cover a wide range of student-chosen issues, including the economy, the war, the environment, immigration, abortion, health care, gay marriage and college tuition. While they represent the political spectrum, the letters have much in common. They show real concerns for the world in which students live and an ability to put those concerns into words.
To those of us at NWP, the response of students confirms the importance of writing, not only to academic and workplace success, but also to participation in the democratic process. By using writing to engage in the current conversations about the future of our country, students learn about new worlds. “Before this project, I didn’t think about political issues,” said Sam Hand, a junior in Ellen Shelton’s Advanced Placement® English class at Tupelo High School in Mississippi.
Sam’s reaction is encouraging to the thousands of teachers who work together at their local writing project sites to open up new worlds of knowledge about the teaching of writing and the uses of writing to learn. Across the country, teachers of all grade levels and disciplines have the opportunity to participate in writing project professional development communities at nearly 200 university-based sites that partner with local schools. Collectively, local sites serve more than 135,000 participants annually with summer institutes and school-year programs. The high-quality learning experience that teachers encounter through the writing project directly benefits their students (www.nwp.org).
Indeed, our nation’s students have exhibited through the Letters to the Next President project that they are both committed and skilled. So are our teachers. It is through ongoing and thoughtful dedication to students and teachers alike that young people will have the skills to make important contributions to all of
our futures.
Sharon J. Washington is the executive director of the National Writing Project.
