KCAC teacher consultants are available to facilitate professional development workshops, courses and institutes for other educators around the country. KCAC sessions for teachers draw on activities originally developed for the summer institutes and academic-year continuity programs created during our multi-year NEH-funded program. KCAC professional development also draws on and extends the classroom-tested lessons from teachers affiliated with the program.

For information about KCAC professional development, contact the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project at kmwp@kennesaw.edu.

KCAC professional development opportunities place teachers in the position of students. Teachers try out approaches for community inquiry which they can then use in their own classrooms. Reflections by teachers who have participated in the KCAC project stress the benefits they have found from experiencing the model firsthand. The learning teachers achieve through KCAC prepares them to build students’ research and writing skills, as well as a strong sense of community in the classroom and beyond.

Reflections

In this ongoing project, teachers from a wide variety of instructional settings are participating in several writing-based activities:

• guiding their students' research and writing on local cultures, including stories, artifacts, places, and events that have been left out of prior records of community life

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"Through interdisciplinary inquiry we explore where we live with an ultimate goal of making communities of critically aware, productive and involved citizens."- Linda Templeton, East Paulding High School

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• collaborating with a small group of colleagues to research one of our project's central themes and to create related resources for other educators

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"Never again will I view text in such a limited manner. Each of us brought a different way of viewing the material, and blossomed because of it. Collaboration is key: it is key for developing both the community and its teachers."-Oreather Bostick-Morgan, Atlanta Public Schools

 

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• working with all project participants to produce a flexible model for community-based learning that cuts across typical subject-area boundaries

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"KCAC creates an intensely energized teacher who in turn brings that energy to the classroom. Participation in KCAC has taught me to discover without boundaries...to explore without limits."-Sylvia Martinez, Campbell High School

 

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• disseminating teacher-and student-made materials (e.g., exhibits, print publications, public performances, web pages) that celebrate and critique community life

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"The KCAC assignment was a success: The students and their parents really got into it and had to think differently, and I came to realize that my students and their families were interested in what was happening both in and to their community."-Gerri Hajduk, Wheeler High School

 

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