Articles, essays, editorials, and meditations on T&W’s mission, “educating the imagination.”
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Sharoon writes about introducing a English creative writing workshop to international educators in Indian academic circles, as a model for nurturing creativity and language skills in their students.
She writes: “The workshop became the shinrinyoko for many participants. In writing, they made a journey: towards themselves and towards finding meaning in why they do what they do.”
In this 1998 article from the archives by Phillip Lopate, he says “Of course I don’t wish to dilute their human feeling for this person who has suffered and witnessed great suffering; but I want them to understand the mastery of language that Baldwin accomplished, because this is part of the positive side of the ledger that helped him survive—and may help them survive.”
In this article, T&W Editorial Fellow Trace Howard DePass writes about teaching the poetic form, the tritina to provide High School students with a platform for self expression and to further process their oppression with language and poetic tools.
In this virtual creative writing lesson plan by educator and poet Joanna Fuhrman, she asks students to choose meaningful objects from home to create the abstract landscape of a map, drawing on images and details from their inner lives to write a poem based on memory and location.
In this article by Dean Schneider, middle school students experiment with personal fiction writing, guided by the art of teaching creative writing philosophies of Meredith Sue Willis. Her book “Personal Fiction Writing” was published by Teachers & Writers Collaborative in 2000.
Sarah M. Sala’s debut collection, Devil’s Lake, explores American violence and its impact on marginalized groups, including her own queer community[1]. In a range of poetic forms, including erasures, histories, and experimental lyrics, Sala meditates on the relationship between linguistic and physical violence, and asserts that language itself holds the potential for evolution.
In this forward to Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, Ron Padgett discusses the origins of Teachers & Writers as a nonprofit that brought a new way of teaching poetry to children in the U.S. and the legacy of Kenneth Koch as a writer and educator.
In this Art of Teaching Writing article, former WITS Executive Director for over 20 years Robin Reagler reflects on the influence that two books “Wishes, Lies, and Dreams” by T&W founding member Kennech Koch and “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” by Paulo Freire, had on the development of the program’s teaching model.
Read this interview by T&W teaching artist Matthew Thompson with Yahdon Israel, a Brooklyn-based teacher and writer who has used social media and virtual learning to make critical engagement with the written word available and accessible to students across the globe and class spectrum.
In this article, teacher Brittny Ray Crowell brings the poem, “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store,” by Eve Ewing to “help students see that poetry can offer a means of reckoning with history and trauma, and to show them that there is power, and perhaps even beauty, in the process of artistic re-envisioning.”