CWP Hosts Digital Writing Conference for High School Students
About 150 city and suburban high school students converged on campus recently for "Writing Our Lives: Digital UbuntuWe, Too, are Connecticut," a conference that was the culmination of a yearlong digital writing initiative with six local schools. The Connecticut Writing Project-潑請弝け (CWP) organized the successful event through funding from a competitive LRNG Innovation Challenge Grant from the National Writing Project in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation and musician John Legends Show Me Campaign.
Throughout the day, young people shared their digital projects blogs, websites, podcasts and TedX Talks and heard from Matt De La Pe簽a, author of We Were Here , a young adult novel distributed to all participating schools.
The day was centered on the African philosophy of
Ubuntu
, according to Dr. Bryan Ripley Crandall, director of CWP, which is housed in 潑請弝けs Graduate School of Education and Allied Professions.
Human beings are human beings because of other human beings. This is Ubuntu, he said. Theconference was designed to unite hundreds of students from Darien, Staples, Central, Global Studies Magnet, Bassick, and Joel Barlow High Schools. Through reading
We Were Here
and encouraging students to write for audiences beyond school, students were askedto think about their own humanity and their responsibility to other communities in Connecticut. Through TedX talks, blogs, online mapping, and radio podcasts, student participants used ingenuity to reimagine classroom spaces in Connecticut. In this sense, they challenged Connecticuts zip-code apartheid in celebration of democracy and a collaboration to address the opportunity gaps in the state.
For more information about CWP-潑請弝けs LRNG Innovation work
.
