Northern Virginia Shares Ideas With Northern California

By: Pete Pazmino, Suzanne Linebarger
Publication: The Voice, Vol. 5, No. 4
Date: September-October 2000

Summary: Suzanne Linebarger and Pete Pazmino discuss the collaborative opportunities of the nationwide NWP Teacher Exchange Program.

Pete

In the summer of 1999, I left for a National Writing Project Teacher Exchange in Gallup, New Mexico. I spent two weeks at the Four Corners Writing Project site observing how things were done outside of Virginia. When I returned to Northern Virginia, the exchange participant who had taken my place, Suzanne Linebarger, was in the final days of her visit. We met each other for the first time at one of the weekly summer institute parties. I shared with her a little bit about my experiences in New Mexico, and she in turn discussed with me what she had found interesting during her time in Virginia.

Suzanne

I was especially excited to meet Pete and hear about his New Mexico exchange and to find out more about Northern Virginia Writing Project's professional journal. It was the kind of journal I wanted us to produce in Northern California. At our first meeting, we decided to begin a partnership in which Northern California would help Northern Virginia begin an advanced institute and Northern Virginia would help Northern California begin a professional journal.

Pete and Suzanne

In a joint proposal to the Teacher Exchange program, we formalized our plans for a continuing partnership and were each awarded a minigrant that enabled us to meet for a second time in Denver, Colorado, during the 1999 NCTE conference. During this meeting, we laid out rough plans for our respective projects. Donald Gallehr, director of the Northern Virginia Writing Project (NVWP), later used our plans to write several grant applications designed to fund an advanced institute. Suzanne later presented our plans to her site's steering committee and, with great enthusiasm, arranged for funding to begin a journal using the Northern Virginia model.

Unfortunately, the NVWP has not yet been able to secure funding for an advanced institute. However, much progress has been made in launching the Northern California journal. In a two-day meeting at Suzanne's house in Paradise, California, we set up templates, imported existing articles, and created a mock-up of a Northern California journal that will eventually be used to design the real thing.

The Journal began as a newsletter for NVWP and evolved into a bimonthly professional publication serving all seven Virginia Writing Project sites. It allows for regular contact between the various sites and provides teacher-consultants throughout Virginia with an accessible way to publish their writing. The Northern California journal will be published twice a year to showcase the writing of Northern California teacher-consultants and to keep teacher consultants across this large region informed of writing project business.

We plan to continue sharing articles and guest features: Virginia teacher-consultants and Northern California teacher-consultants will write for publication simultaneously in both journals. We know that our coast-to-coast collaboration will enhance the overall quality of both sites, and we intend to continue an in-house yearly exchange, in which Northern California and Northern Virginia teacher-consultants can participate in each other's summer institutes.

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