The Tar River Writing Project began in 2007 as a collaborative project among the Department of English (Thomas Hariott College of Arts and Sciences), the Department of Curriculum & Instruction (College of Education), and schools and school districts in Eastern North Carolina. A network of teachers and teacher-researchers across all academic disciplines and at all levels of education (pre-K through university), the TRWP fosters an environment in which teaching professionals come together to be better writers and better teachers of writing, and to literacy in our region of North Carolina.
In 1998, I was fortunate enough to participate in the first summer institute of the Georgia Southern Writing Project, a new site of the National Writing Project, and located in Statesboro, GA. That summer was transformative for me in many ways. I had started teaching writing and literature with little to no professional training; I had worked in the writing center as a consultant and had taken a course that was supposed to teach graduate students about teaching writing, but that course was mostly making sure the graduate students knew their grammar and mechanics. In the Summer Institute, and then throughout the year as part of a year-long cohort of teacher-researchers, I read extensively about composition and rhetoric, about pedagogy, about literacy — and I work on these ideas through engaging with teachers of different subjects and from different contexts. That institute created a space for me to radically rethink my own beliefs and values about teaching and about writing, and it created a space where I felt empowered as a young teacher to connect my classroom with research and scholarship.
When I left GSU to work on my PhD, one of the reasons I chose Illinois State University was that the English department there had an active site of the National Writing Project. While I was there, the NWP provide funding to support a new local site leader, the “technology liaison.” Site Director Janice Neuleib asked me to fill this role, and between that participating in the NWP’s summer E-Anthology of writing as a facilitator, I had the opportunity to work with a range of teachers regarding literacy and technology/digital rhetorics.
Because of those experiences, when I got to ECU, I was excited to establish an NWP site there. Beginning in 2005, my colleague Todd Finley and I spent a lot of time researching the options and possibilities at ECU for hosting a site, prepared the grant paperwork, and submitted the materials. In summer 2007, we hosted our first Summer Institute.
For the next several years, we hosted regular summer institutes with area teachers and applied for additional grants to support even more projects. Beginning in 2012, the NWP lost direct federal funding and since then, we have been working to sustain the project with various mini-grants and other initiatives. The Tar River Writing Project remains one of the most important professional experiences of my life.
