NWP Radio

The final episode of our seven-part series, The Nebraska Experience , explores an approach to teaching argument writing that involves students in researching local issues and presenting advocacy writing live to legislators at the state capitol. The project detailed here involved a semester-long collaboration between college and high-school students as part of the Husker Writers program, which spon...

Hear about a new partnership between the National Park Service and the Nebraska Writing Project that is under development and moving toward a planned river float for area high school students to allow them to experience the Niobrara River in a way they may not have done in the past. The Nebraska Writing Project is planning writing experiences in the areas of the significant river ecology, paleonto...

For this episode of The Write Time , we have the pleasure of visiting with award-winning author Adib Khorram . Adib is the author of Darius The Great is Not Okay and his next book, Darius The Great Deserves Better , will be released August 25, 2020. Leading the discussion will be Aram Kabodian , a longtime educator, the 2016 MCTE Middle School Teacher of the Year, and a Red Cedar Writing Project t...

Part five of The Nebraska Experience gives an outline of the initial work between the Nebraska Writing Project and Agate Fossil Beds National Monument and examines the rich place-based teaching that occurred in this partnership. Our guests describe how they developed the paleontological, geological, and early history of the plains stories from this park into a series of workshops designed for teac...

This podcast—part four of a seven-part series—focuses on how the Prairie Visions Writing Workshop for students and teachers came about due to the wish of the Homestead National Monument of America’s National Park Service to bring a focused writing workshop to the monument location that would take advantage of the history and process of the Homestead Act of 1862. The workshop developed writing sess...

This podcast focuses on Nebraska Writing Project co-director  Melissa Legate ’s pedagogical work to blend a place-based study of rural population decline with the College, Career, and Community Writers Program (C3WP) focus on writing from multiple perspectives and nuanced claims. This project is offered as an example of the place-conscious principle of creating active citizens in the local communi...

This podcast describes an 8-week joint class project between Nebraska Writing Project teacher-leader Cara Morgenson’s Thematic Issues course for level three English Language Learners at Lincoln High School, Dr. Robert Brooke’s college junior Uses of Literacy students, and Homestead National Monument of America. The project focused on immigration issues in Lincoln, Nebraska, grounded in the histori...

This podcast is the first of a seven-part series that introduces the big concepts of place-conscious education as used by Nebraska Writing Project teachers. Special guest Dr. Robert Brooke, director of the Nebraska Writing Project, situates listeners to place-conscious work in Nebraska in three stages: the Rural Institute program developed 1995-2007; the online Place-Conscious Institute and the su...

In this episode of The Write Time we are honored to have Laurie Halse Anderson join us to discuss writing, learning, and life. She is the author of Speak , Prom , Twisted , Catalyst , Wintergirls ,  The Impossible Knife of Memory , and more. Laurie is interviewed by NWP teacher-leader Rebecca Marsick who has taught elementary, middle, and high school, and is currently a Secondary Literacy Coach fo...

In this episode of The Write Time, Jarred Amato the co-founder of Project LIT is interviewed by Connecticut English teacher Sean Astle. Jarred himself is a high school English teacher in Nashville, TN and Sean Astle is an English teacher in Connecticut where he is studying how young adult literature can be used to improve the literacy practices of all readers and writers. Each episode of The Write...

Listen to this conversation between children's book authors and illustrators Shanda McCloskey , K-Fai Steele , Mika Song , and Ana Aranda along with Texas educator and NWP teacher-leader Katie McKay . Together, our guests will examine works-in-progress and talk about how they can support young writers in understanding authors’ craft.

About Our Guests Marie Lu is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Young Elites series as well as the blockbuster Legend series. She has also been an artist in the video game industry, but is now a full-time author living in Los Angeles. Rose Brock is an assistant professor at Sam Houston State University and a co-founder of the national literacy initiative, Guys Listen. She is also the...

In this episode of The Write Time we visit with Jeff Zentner , author of The Serpent King , Goodbye Days , and Rayne and Delilah's Midnite Matinee . Jeff is the recipient of the William C. Morris Award and his work has been selected as an ALA-YALSA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults. Jeff is interviewed by Dr. Susan Densmore-James , an Associate Professor at the University of West Florida, the...

National Writing Project teacher-leader Janelle Q. Bence interviews New York Times Best-selling author Erika Sánchez in our special NWP Radio series, The Write Time. Sánchez is the author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter and a recent recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Each episode of Th...

We are pleased to have Sandra Murphy and Mary Ann Smith join us for this episode of NWP Radio. They are the authors of a new book just in time for summer professional development, Writing to Make an Impact: Expanding the Vision of Writing in the Secondary Classroom . Joining Sandy and Mary Ann are two teachers who are featured in Writing to Make an Impact , Brooke Ann McWilliams , who teaches midd...

NWP Radio, in partnership with the Connecticut Writing Project at Fairfield and Penguin Random House Books, has launched a special series called “The Write Time” where writing teachers from across the NWP Network interview young adult and children’s authors about their books, their composing processes, and writers’ craft. In this episode, we're pleased to host a discussion with author Matt de la P...

NWP Radio, in partnership with the Connecticut Writing Project at Fairfield and Penguin Random House Books, has launched a special series called “The Write Time” where writing teachers from across the NWP Network interview young adult and children’s authors about their books, their composing processes, and writers’ craft. For this episode, our guests include Nic Stone , an Atlanta native and Spelm...

We were so fortunate to have the one and only Gene Luen Yang with us to discuss his new graphic novel, Dragon Hoops . He was joined by Bryan Ripley Crandall , Director of CWP-Fairfield ; Mark Crandall, Founder of Hoops4Hope ; and teachers Abu Bility and William King. Kids are home. Teachers are home. Parents are home. We thought it would be a perfect opportunity to #StepForward with an incredible...

What is possible when youth are asked to engage in the discourse about what is meant by “adolescence”? Our May reading for Marginal Syllabus describes what happens when educators and youth partner together to explore historically situated views of adolescence. This article by Sophia Sarigianides details the ways in which one educator helped familiarize students with the genealogy of adolescence, u...

Join us for an interview with Liz Prather , teacher-consultant at the Morehead State Writing Project, and author of Story Matters . We’ll talk about why narrative matters, how it works in informational and argumentative writing, and how to support students to write it better.

Join us for a conversation with Richard Koch and Elizabethe Dutro, to discuss their recent publications, The Mindful Writing Workshop and The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy . We will discuss literacy teaching that is informed by and mindful of the stress and trauma in all of our lives. Guests Elizabeth Dutro , Professor and Chair of Literacy Studies, University of Colorado at Boulder Richard Koch ,...

This author discussion features Sakeena Everett, Andrea Zellner, Anna Smith, Sam Reed, Joe Dillon, and Remi Kalir. The piece being discussed, "'Untold Stories': Cultivating Consequential Writing with a Black Male Student through a Critical Approach to Metaphor," shares Sakeena Everett’s work learning alongside a student in a summer program called “We Choose to Learn.” This university-based program...

Join NWP Radio to learn about NCTE’s Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning (AEPL) and their annual conference. Our guests include Bruce Novak, the conference organizer; Mary Rose O’Reilley, this year’s keynote speaker; and Jeff Wilhem, director of the Boise State Writing Project. This year’s conference, “The Art of Encounter in Teaching and Learning,” will take place in Colorado, June 25-...

Our February reading for the 2019-20 Literacy, Equity + Remarkable Notes = LEARN Marginal Syllabus explores the multiliteracies among youth of color who constructed tributes to the city of Detroit and envisioned strengths in their communities. Researchers Vaughn W. M. Watson and Alecia Beymer write about the after-school Verses Project at Detroit’s Community Music School. This article describes th...

Our January reading for LEARN Marginal Syllabus recounts how Alex Corbitt, the author and former middle school educator, employed “radically student-centered” pedagogy as part of a teen activism course. In his Voices from the Middle article, Corbitt describes how he reimagined an elective course in order to situate and support students as activists. Assigned to teach a documentary film class, he p...