Project gives teachers confidence

Hundreds of Omaha-area English teachers soon will get the chance to shake a nagging problem that has dogged the profession for years, professors and teachers say.

The problem: Many teachers who are expected to fine-tune students’ writing aren’t comfortable with their own writing.

The solution: a new Omaha writing project for teachers that has shown success in other cities, researchers say.

The Oxbow Writing Project, run by the University of Nebraska at Omaha and funded in part by a national grant, will soon choose 20 teachers to participate in the project’s first Omaha seminar this summer.

For four weeks, these teachers will discuss effective and ineffective methods of classroom writing instruction. They will talk about tapping into teenagers’ love for texting and tweeting and use that technology to the writing instructor’s advantage.

And they will write. A lot.

“It can be a life-changing event,” said Wilma Kuhlman, a UNO education professor, a one-time participant in a Missouri writing project and now co-leader of the new UNO writing project. “It can change oneself from someone who writes to someone who is a writer.”

Jennifer Stastny, an Omaha Central High School English teacher, also has experience with a similar seminar, having participated in the Nebraska Writing Project in 2004.

Before going through the seminar, hosted for decades by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Stastny sometimes assigned lists of traditional study guide questions — narrowly focused questions about a book that often had a clear right-or-wrong answer, she said.

After the seminar, Stastny found herself gravitating to much more open-ended writing assignments — assignments that called on students to be analytical and creative.

Questions such as “How would you analyze your own response to this story?”

Or “How does Anne Frank’s ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’ apply to your life?”

“I think the most important thing it did for me was validate me as a writer,” Stastny said. “In feeling more confident, I’m able to give students more freedom.”

Kuhlman said the UNO co-leaders won’t ignore the new ways in which students write as they prepare the first Oxbow seminar, scheduled for June 7 to July 2 at UNO.

Text messages and Twitter can be positive things, she and Stastny both said, as they keep students writing. The space constraints of text messages or tweets also force students to write as concisely as possible — a valuable skill in any form of writing, they said.

“If we can actually tap into that as teachers, rather than squelch it, which we all know isn’t going to work … the research says that students can write in their own dialect, and then formal English,” Kuhlman said. “They can learn to write differently in different settings.”

Contact the writer:

444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com

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