Jolene’s experiences came from the fact that she was a “young, naïve teacher with little writing instruction and experience.” The remedy: she became involved in the first writing project in Pennsylvania in the summer of 1980 when she attended the six-week summer writing institute. For the next 15 years she was the co-director of the project with Dr. Robert Weiss at West Chester University. Jolene taught Writing Strategies Courses, designed the “Summer Youth Writing Project” and went off site to lead Summer Institutes in different parts of the state. This life-changing event shaped her teaching, her career and most importantly her students’ learning. She taught middle and high school for 21 years in suburban Philadelphia and earned her doctorate at Widener University where she researched what made students successful on local, state, and national writing assessments. She left the classroom to work with teachers as a staff developer, a national six traits trainer for a large educational publishing company. With a volunteer group, she traveled to Guatemala to help struggling schools. There she presented writing as a process, the six traits, and frontloading strategies to Guatemalan teachers. All were eager and excited to learn about writing and methods to help their students be better writers. Jolene found that it didn’t matter that most of the teachers were Spanish speaking and needed an interpreter to understand her; what they heard were motivating ideas, explicit instruction and the power of literacy that they could pass on to their students. Presently, Jolene has added to her repertoire literacy professor at local universities. She is active in many professional literacy organizations and is program co-chair for the Keystone State Reading Association annual conference in October, 2011.
Dick’s interest in writing and visualizing goes back to his college days at Penn State University when he was a writing major with a minor in photography. After graduation, he traveled the country in a Kerouac-mode working as a photographer. From Maine to Colorado to Florida and every state in between, he met the people of the country and heard their stories. Returning from “the road” he began teaching English in the Athens Area School District in Athens, Pennsylvania. As his teaching shifted toward engaging his students in writing, he became more and more interested in the writing process, how the various elements interacted with each other, and how the same writing could grow. Twenty-six years since he began teaching, he is still a writing teacher for the Athens Area School District and co-director of the Endless Mountains Writing Project at Mansfield University. Dick believes writing is a solid way to tell our stories and by our stories we understand our lives. He imparts this daily to his students. This book is an invitation to learn and a journey for all teachers who teach writing.
Stephanie taught first and second grade where creative writing was a part of the language arts curriculum. She encouraged her students to be storytellers and write their stories down; not just Stephanie, but also her students and school community heard and saw the power of their stories through their authorship. Years later, Stephanie was offered a position as a reading specialist in a public school in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Her administration asked her to gain knowledge in the writing process so she could meld the reading-writing connection for her at-risk students. She participated in the Pennsylvania Writing Project at West Chester University where Jolene co-directed the project. Through her writing experiences, she realized the reciprocal relationship that writing is important to reading and reading is important to writing. As she worked with her at-risk readers and writers for over 20 years, she implemented the tools that her students needed to become more literate. Stephanie was appointed to a statewide steering committee commissioned by the governor to develop the Oral History Project, an authentic learning experience integrating the academic standards of reading, writing, speaking and listening. At the Governor’s Institutes in Pennsylvania, this project was attended by hundreds of teachers with the understanding that they would implement it in their classrooms. This project culminated in 2006 with the publishing of the book which Stephanie co-authored with colleagues Diane Skiffington Dickson, Dick Heyler, and Linda Reilly entitled The Oral History Project: Connecting Students to Their Community, Grades 4 – 8. She is the past president of the Keystone State Reading Association and is presently the editor of their newsletter, The Keystone Reader. Stephanie earned her doctorate of Education in Reading at Lehigh University and has recently retired from the Department of Reading Education at East Stroudsburg University, Pennsylvania.
