10 Years of NWP

The National Writing Project is now a decade old in the UK: a worthy achievement and a significant milestone deserving of celebration.

At its heart that is ten years of encouraging and supporting teachers to become experts in the teaching of writing through a network of teachers’ writing groups. London’s ‘Whodunit group’ is one of the oldest and well-established of these, so it is fitting that it is their meeting this month which is being taken over to mark this special anniversary on Saturday 25th January.

We will meet at the Wellcome Collection, a museum on the Euston Road in London, in the cafe at 10am. NWP co-founder, Jeni Smith promises ‘writing fun and games’ between 10am and 1pm. The current exhibition at the Wellcome is called ‘Play Well’ and considers the transformational impact of play in our lives, so prompts will, of course, be appropriately playful!

All are welcome to join us. If you are an NWP member past or present, or considering becoming one in the future - and you are in London that weekend - come out and play! It will be the perfect opportunity to meet up with others from the NWP community, to write, to share, and to celebrate how far the project has come.

Started back in 2009 by Jenifer Smith, University of East Anglia, and by Simon Wrigley, English adviser for Buckinghamshire, 2004-2013, and chair of NATE, 2004-6, the UK’s project built on the long-running, successful US National Writing Project. Since then it has evolved through exciting partnerships, research and collaboration, carefully cultivated by the huge commitment, creative ideas and winning inspiration of Jeni and Simon.

Here’s to the next decade!

Spreading the word

NWP has been spreading the word about Writing Teachers groups at Goldsmith’s University, London.

Co-chairs, Jeni Smith and Emily Rowe received a warm welcome at the University during a recent conference about creative writing in schools. It was a great opportunity to engage with a receptive audience of PGCE students and English teachers. Students and teachers wrote together and spent time discussing how being a part of the NWP can develop individuals both personally and professionally. Jeni and Emily gained a highly positive response, with many seeking information about existing writing groups or how to start one.

“We were reminded of the deep concern felt by many teachers regarding the teaching of English within our current educational system - but we are certainly heartened by the bold and thoughtful teachers and prospective teachers whom we met,” explained Emily.

Happy new year to all, and we hope that the National Writing Project will continue to reach new teacher writers in 2020.

November 2019: Change is afoot

November 2019 Change is afoot at the National Writing Project.

Alongside our shiny new website - and new and invigorated social media platforms - we have plenty of new faces on board to help Simon Wrigley and Jeni Smith move the project forward into its next phase.

At its core, it remains a network of teachers' writing groups, run by teachers for teachers. It is still a grass-roots, not-for-profit, teacher-owned research project that aims to explore writing and find out further answers to the question, 'What happens when teachers gather together to write and share their writing?' But we have done some further thinking about our principles and values, and about how best to promote them.

The first is that we work together to foster and celebrate the authentic voices of teachers and children across all phases of education. That means that in our ‘galleries’ on the website, for example, we will aim to do more celebration of the work that writing teachers and children do. And by ‘authentic’ we mean real writing - writing that diverges from formulaic structures and ‘Lego linguistics’ and encourages genuine independent voices to emerge in the classroom and beyond.

It is taking us a little while to transfer everything over from the old website, but you can still see favourite resources there at https://thenationalwritingproject.weebly.com/ , so fear not, nothing is lost - but please bear with us as we transfer everything over. Meanwhile, happy writing.

October: Sweet Memories

Writing from our own experience is very often a good way to start, and the mixed pleasures of sweets at Hallowe’en and Bonfire Night are a rich vein to tap.

Start with words. List all the names of sweets that you can think of. Refreshers, jelly snakes, Dime bars, gobstoppers…

Read round. One word from each person in turn. Keep going until everyone is out of words. Encourage repetitions. Advise people not to worry if someone has already said something they have on their list, after all, surely you can never have too many sherbet lemons!

Spend a bit of time sharing thoughts and memories about sweets. Remember, perhaps, Roald Dahl’s description of the sweetshop in Boy. Or here is Nigel Slater on ‘The Ritual of the KitKat’. Read the instructions –there is bound to be controversy. And he doesn’t even start on the whole business of eating –nibble the chocolate or bite straight in?

The lost ritual of KitKat-eating: the indescribably enjoyable art tat used to be involved in eating a bar if KitKat before some unimaginative clot decided to repackage it.

Slide the bar from its open-sided wrapper without tearing the wrapper. Do not puncture he gossamer-thin foil. Gently rub your finger over each finger of chocolate to reveal the word ‘KitKat’. Slide your thumbnail down the first of the valleys in between the chocolate fingers, this tearing the foil. (It is important to tear the foil in a straight line, and to keep the edges of the tear as smooth as possible.) Eat, finger by finger, breaking off a new one as you go, rather than all at once.

It must be said that there were some who liked to unwrap their KitKat without cutting the foil Those who did, inevitably also smoothed the foil out afterwards, so that it was completely flat and smooth. They then rolled it up into a tiny ball. Because of its inherent thinness, KitKat foil made a smaller ball than any other chocolate bar.

From Eating for England The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table. Nigel Slater.

Launch into a longer piece of writing. The prompt, really, is the list of sweets and the talk surrounding them. It is a memory of sweets, the buying and the eating of them, the feel and look of them. Whatever comes to you.

Enjoy the stories and memories. More will arise as you read and listen.