The San Antonio Writing Project
Professional Development Opportunities
SAWP News & Calendar
SAWP Interactive
Notes from the Visioning and Leadership Retreat
We had a small group at Roxanne's on Saturday, but it was a very productive working group. Special thanks to Joni Koehler, Kim Saxon, Therese Fleming, Aurelia Davila de Silva, Nora Gonzalez, Nancy Gregory, and Jacob Sanchez, our new GA, for all their hard work. Lennie and Roxanne are very excited about all our new ventures. We worked on 3 main projects, our upcoming SAWP Conference February 2nd, the Writing Camps and Open Institutes for summer 2008, and our ELL-Cuentos Literacy Project. The following are the notes taken during our retreat. We are sharing them so that everyone can be involved in the projects.Kim Saxon will be the TC liaison for the SAWP Conference. We're going to have the conference February 2nd from 9am -12:30 pm at the UTSA Downtown Campus. Lennie will be working on having online registration for attendees to sign up. For sessions we are asking our TC/presenters decide on their topic, the designation of GT and/or ESL as well as grade levels that your demonstration is for. This year we will be able to pay our TC/presenters. We will give out certificates at the end to participants. We need to reserve the conference room next to the main room for food. Rosie Garcia, we need your help. How should be do the folders and refreshments? For speakers we were thinking of (in this order) Gary Clack, Diane Bertrand, or John Philip Santos? You can email sawpATutsa.edu with any ideas that you have for the conference and with your presentation title.
Nancy Gregory will be the TC liaison for the Writing Camps and Open Institutes. We wanted to open up the writing camps and open institutes to all our TCs. If any of you would like to create a writing camp or a one week open institute in your school district, the time to work on it is now. Lennie and Roxanne will be happy to talk to administrators with you. One idea we had was to offer our writing camps during summer school but in the afternoon. We might even tie this to TAKS or college essays. We're creating brochures that you can take to your administration to explain the camps. Please let Jacob know at sawpATutsa.edu if you are interested in pursuing this. Send us a paragraph about the camp or open institute that you are thinking about doing. We were also thinking of putting some of this information on the SAWP website to advertise these camps and institutes to the wider community.
Finally we're very excited about the ELL-Cuentos Literacy Project. Therese Fleming will be the liaison for ELL and share the materials that she uses for her Cuentos Family Literacy Project. We imagined that many of you may want to do this project in your classrooms. We thought about recording stories on tape or video camera, collecting students' art work and having a city wide exhibition of this work, perhaps at the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center or the Institute of Texan Cultures. Story core on NPR or Ayala, the features editor of the Express News were also ideas to promote Cuentos. We could even end up with a book and presentations at multiple conferences.
We decided to read two books for our February 23 book discussion. The first is Barrio Teacher by Arcadia Lopez. She was a Bilingual teacher in San Antonio who was honored last week at the Texas Bilingual Conference and was featured on the front page of the Express-News last Thursday. She left $700,000 for scholarships for future Bilingual teachers at UTSA. Her memoir is short and inspiring. The second book that we chose was Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation by John Phillip Santos. We thought that both of these books might give us insights into the Cuentos project. Let us know if you want to read the books and participate in our book club. We'll buy the books for you. Please get back to us by Monday, October 29th on this.
Please let us know which projects you are interested in participating in. Aurelia will be the liaison for another group: Advocacy. We still need to brainstorm ideas for this group. We need everyone's help with the big conference, so mark your calendars for February 2nd. Our next meeting is Saturday December 1st where we will be working on the conference. Please plan to come. Also at this meeting you can pick up your SAWP T-shirt if you haven't already. Thanks.
Home | Director's Message | News | Summer Institute | Forums | Professional Development | Contact | NWP
Site created and maintained by Lennie Irvin. Last updated on October 22, 2007
Site created and maintained by Lennie Irvin. Last updated on October 22, 2007