Welcome to WordPlay, the newsletter of the UCI Writing Project. I hope that you will enjoy our inaugural issue, and that you may perhaps be inspired to contribute to future issues. Our goals are to provide information that may be useful and informative to our Writing Project community, as well as to maintain that community by providing a space in which we may connect through writing.
In this issue you will find information about upcoming events from around the National Writing Project, including our own December 15 UCIWP winter conference. You will also have the opportunity to “meet” our newsletter staff, as well as two of our newest fellows, Rachel Grefe and Chris Carranza. There are book reviews for high, middle, and elementary grades, a heartfelt OpEd from Laseanda Wesson, and a lovely poem by Megan Grint. I hope you will enjoy all of these articles.
I also hope that you will participate in this community. Please send your comments, suggestions, and submissions. My email is eharring@uci.edu and I would love to hear from you.
I also hope that you will participate in this community. Please send your comments, suggestions, and submissions. My email is eharring@uci.edu and I would love to hear from you.
New Fellow Spotlight:
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Rachel Grefe
Since graduating from UCI’s M.A.T. program in 2019, I’ve been teaching in the Anaheim Union High School District both virtually and in person. In my three-ish years teaching English, I’ve spent a year in junior high and two now in high school. I love the range of energetic, silly, and wonderful student personalities. Creative and personal writing excites me, and I think it’s so important that students have the opportunity to write meaningfully about themselves and their experiences. For my inquiry project, I sought to answer the question, “How can I utilize a mentor text and reflection protocols to help students connect meaningful experiences and beliefs to their personal writing?” … |
Chris Carranza
As a learner, I’ve always been interested in the things that make us who we are and how they shape our understanding of the world around us. It makes sense, then, that I’d look for ways to explore this idea as an educator with my students. My inquiry during the UCIWP Summer Institute took inspiration from Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s notion that, as educators, we must provide students with opportunities for self-discovery to foster the necessary work toward a more equitable society. And when I think about how we find ourselves connected to each other as humans and how we best communicate ourselves to each other, I always come back to one thing -- food! …My project asks students to think about a food that is significant to them in some way, cook that dish with a family member, and then write about the experience for a class cookbook... |
Waiting for Normal?
By Laseanda Wesson
“This is our brand new normal.” It was my third Zoom meeting of the day, and one of the speakers repeatedly and almost gleefully kept making this declaration. “I wish he would stop saying that!” I furiously typed a private message to a friend in the chat, adding an angry face emoji. Something about the way he said it and the repetitiveness of the phrase made my skin want to crawl. This will be the year that everything feels a little more normal…
By Laseanda Wesson
“This is our brand new normal.” It was my third Zoom meeting of the day, and one of the speakers repeatedly and almost gleefully kept making this declaration. “I wish he would stop saying that!” I furiously typed a private message to a friend in the chat, adding an angry face emoji. Something about the way he said it and the repetitiveness of the phrase made my skin want to crawl. This will be the year that everything feels a little more normal…