The Stuff of Writing:
Parents in the Writing Community

Sara Schwabacher Cornerstone Associate for Parent and Community Engagement

This was the scene.  A small group of parents were in a very big room with a large group of principals, coaches and Cornerstone staff.  The environment was filled with poster-sized visuals of Philadelphia, artifacts, documents, and a good selection of books about the colonial period.  We were being prepared to go on a field trip to historical sites of colonial Philadelphia where we would see for ourselves people, places and things.  What an incredible experience was being provided!  Kelly Hunter, Cornerstone Literacy Fellow, had offered these many supports to the teachers and principals who were preparing to undertake a journey to their own historical fiction writing experience.   Parents who were present had none of the experience with writing or teaching writing that the professionals had.  We decided to scaffold their experience by working as a group instead of individuals.  I worked with them, and we added Nereida – who is an experienced educator but has had challenges with writing, mostly due to her experiences with learning English as a second language.   We took on the assignment to write together a group piece. 

First, Kelly asked us all to develop a character.  The four of us walked around the room looking at pictures of historical people and reading about them.  We began with questions:

• male or female;
• black or white;
• adult or child? 

We looked at the displays on the walls and in the books around the room.  We read about Phyliss Wheatley, the slave poet who was 14 years old when she was first published; about Betsy Ross who was born Elizabeth Griscom; and about James Forten, the free black man who was 14 when he joined the navy.  

We decided our character would be a 14 year old slave girl who lived in Philadelphia.  We named her Susan Griscom.

We then began, as a group, to voice ideas.   We decided that she had overheard people talking about the 14 year old slave girl poet who was taken around to society homes and shown off.  She wished she could read.  And she was worried about her fate.  It seemed like 14 year olds were doing all sorts of adult things and this would be the time of her life when big changes happened. 

Each of us made additional contributions to the story about our character:

• She doesn’t know who her parents are.
• Her best friend is a mouse.  The mouse feels safe with her and takes bread from her hand.
• She talks to the mouse.  She tells the mouse that she wonders about her parents and that she wishes she could read like Phyllis Wheatley.
• She is nosy and inquisitive. She sneaks in rooms to listen to the adult conversation at her owners’ home.

We made a first stab at group writing:

The Griscom family is actively involved in the rebel cause.  Susan lurks around their conversations eager to hear about secrets.  She hears about the 14 year old slave poet and she talks to the mouse about her worries.

Kelly told us to think about a Person in a Place doing Something, and to portray Action with Dialogue. 

We went off to Colonial Philadelphia to visit the Betsy Ross house.  When we got there, we realized that Betsy Ross was a Quaker and probably her family didn’t have slaves.  We were impressed with the fact that Betsy worked from an early age (14 years old!), and that she maintained a business after her first husband’s death, even teaching her second husband how to sew.  We were struck by the fact that it was because Betsy had learned to sew that she was able to survive as a woman through challenging times, and that she lived a very long life.

We did not finish the assignment in the Writer’s Café that evening (back at the conference site) because life intervened.  One of the parents, Anita, was at the Institute with her grandson’s kindergarten teacher.  The teacher, Kathy, had an acute allergic reaction to the mold at the Betsy Ross house, and Anita and I ended up spending the evening with her in the hospital emergency room. 

Linda, another parent, was a little relieved that our group was not going back to work on the story.  But, she talked about bringing her son to some of the sites we visited on a vacation trip planned for later that summer.  And she spent the bus ride back to the conference center telling Nereida how much she was learning that she had never been exposed to in school.  Anita was so inspired by the field trip that she continued to write our group story on her own when she finally came back from the hospital.  However, instead of leaving her writing at the Institute to be included in the story collection, Anita took it home to “clean it up” before sending it back. 

It didn’t arrive.  When I finally got Anita on the phone, she told me the rest of her summer had been stressful.  She also was not sure she still had the piece.  What happened was that she didn’t know she had a banana in her zipped Cornerstone bag.  When she opened it, the banana had leaked all over everything and she had to throw it all away. 

She did tell me that Kathy (the teacher) is fine and that she’s really happy that Jacob will have her as his kindergarten teacher this year. 

What allowed these parents to get involved in this writing experience, which was already a stretch for some of the professionals?  They were extremely engaged with the materials, with the imaginative play aspect of devising a character, and with researching the sites and history that would make our character accurate.  They were intimidated by the act of writing, but they were most willing to participate with the group.  The development of a story through shared talking and listening was quite accessible. 

The whole idea of community literature is that of bringing voices who are not already engaged in the literary part of the dialogue into the “action” and to make their points of view part of the story.   The group story we generated is full of themes that can guide this process.  Anita contributed the mouse, a very important character who provided the safety of a confidante for sharing hopes and worries.   A second theme was the girl’s desire to read and write like Phyllis Wheatley, because she knew that could change her life.   Our third theme was to select as a main character an “outsider”, like ourselves, who would experience the tumultuous time of the revolution from a unique point of view.

Even the emergency room visit and the rotten banana can be viewed as components of this community literature rather than as impediments to the writing process.  As life intervenes, it becomes the real stuff of writing.  When you include parents, museum employees, bus drivers and hospital workers in your community, and not only teachers and students in classrooms which have been created, structured, and planned to encourage reading and writing,  you have real life to deal with in your writing community.  The emergency room intervenes (luckily this time the teacher was OK and is back in school) and the banana ruins the writing that the parent was too shy to leave behind without correcting the spelling and neatness, and therefore is lost. 

What was this experience like for Anita? What has remained with her from our writer’s community? 

The first thing Anita told me when we got on the phone was:

I only have 10 minutes because my sister-in-law is coming and I have to baby sit her son so she can take her daughter to the doctor.  I am blessed that I don’t have to work, but I am busy from the moment I get up to the minute I go to bed.  I help my husband with his business.  I am a caregiver and I get involved with people.  I still have 5 children at home and I take care of my grandson everyday after school. 

Life intervenes.

Anita shared her experience of the writing community:

I thought going to the Cornerstone Institute was an adventure.  I love to meet people.  I found it very interesting meeting new people, especially the other parents. I enjoyed listening to other parents and seeing that kids everywhere are the same.  They all need the parents to be involved and the community to be involved to be a success in school. 

The writing experience opened up my eyes.  I have a son who is entering Middle School and writing is going to be more of an issue for him because he is tested in writing this year.  It gave me ideas about how to help him become a better writer.  One of the things I took away was working in a small group.  As we were taught at the Cornerstone Institute, you need tons of talking for a small bit of writing.  Before you write you have to discuss at great length what you are going to write about.   I saw this with my daughter in college.  My daughter had questions to answer about religious freedom in the late 1600s.  My husband loves that part of history and he talked with her about what he knew. Just talking with her father helped her answer the questions.  That shows you how important the talking is.

Talking first also helps your children use their imagination.  Not using bland language.  If you talk about it you use longer sentences, adjectives, and more details.  He will have to use details when he’s writing for the test.

I don’t really write a whole bunch.  Honestly, I don’t have time.  That’s where I am at in my life.  I am a parent.  This is my everyday life.

But I do write notes to teachers about different things.  You have to write in a way so that they don’t think you are ignorant.  For example, I have a meeting with my son’s teachers next week.  In middle school it’s not just one teacher, I’m going to be meeting with five teachers.   I write them a note before I meet with them.  I want to write in such a way that they know where I’m coming from, that they understand I am an intelligent person and am not just there to cause trouble.  I am not there to cause trouble, but I don’t like what’s happening.  I am not snotty at all, but it is just being involved in your children’s education. You can’t let things slide. 

I am part of our elementary school PTO.  I always have to stand up in front of parents and discuss different things that are happening in our school.  I think being a part of the PTO I can also get parents interested in helping their own children.  Cornerstone was a very positive experience.  I think I would like to do a writing experience again.  I should really write more, because the more you write, the more articulate you are when you do have to speak in front of people. 

Maybe we can have a Literacy Night and get parents more involved in the whole reading and writing experience.   I could bring it up with our principal.  She would probably think it was a great idea. You get more parents in and you’re teaching them at the same time. We could have it as a fun night and get teachers involved, and parents and the kids.  Parents will show up if it involves their children. 

Anita’s full life reminds us that all of us, teachers and children as well as parents, have lives outside of school. Anita’s family is the context she brings to her thinking about reading and writing.  For her, having an experience of a writing community was about enriching the support she can give to her children to do well in school.  Her thoughts about communicating effectively with teachers, about using writing to organize thoughts for speaking, and about getting more parents and children having fun with reading and writing experiences are also, at heart, about children’s well-being…which is, of course, where we began our journey.  As teachers of writing, we are interested in children’s well-being.  By bringing parents into our writing community, we remember to let life intervene in “the stuff of writing."