The Kentucky Writing Project State Conference will be held Saturday, Sept. 12, from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at the Boone Center at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky.
The conference will focus on schoolwide literacy and improving K-12 student achievement through best practices in writing. The keynote speaker will be Dr. Bryan Ripley Crandall, Director of the Connecticut Writing Project at Fairfield University and a Fellow of the Louisville Writing Project, XXI. For 10+ years Crandall taught at the J. Graham Brown School in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was the portfolio cluster leader and where he oversaw senior culminating projects, including the annual ten-minute play festival. From his classroom, he volunteered with Kentucky Refugee Ministries to support several relocated men known as the “Lost Boys of Sudan.” The Kentucky Writing Portfolio, his teaching experiences in Louisville, and his mentoring of refugee families led to his dissertation, “A Responsibility to Speak Out: Perspectives on Writing from Black AfricanBorn Male Youth with Limited or Disrupted Formal Education,” which won a Syracuse University doctoral prize for research. Now in Connecticut, Crandall continues his work through collaboration with urban schools where he also hosts WRITING OUR LIVES events each year (conferences for student writers). He writes, publishes, and presents on the teaching of writing, youth advocacy, activity theory, and the importance of community outreach.
Morehead Writing Project will be represented at the conference by:
- Leslie Workman (Bath County High School) – Building and Sustaining a Community of Writers
- Mallory Howard (Montgomery County Intermediate School) – Everyone has genius inside of them!
- Vickie Moriarity (Bath County Middle School) – Three Ways to Use Journals in any Classroom
- Liz Prather (School for Creative and Performing Arts in Fayette County) – Clinic in Arts Integration with Writing, Music, and Art
- Tammy Gallenstein (Ward Elementary School in Fleming County) – Using whole brain techniques in writing for the primary classroom
- Deanna Mascle (Morehead State University) – Reinforcing Content Through Creative Word Play
- Brandis Carlson and Jennifer Kidd (Straub Elementary in Mason County) – Writing in Primary
- In addition, Lindsay Johnson (Rowan County High School) and Megan Smedley (Lewis County Middle School) will contribute to the RSPDI follow-up sessions
Learn more about the conference and find registration details on the 2015 KWP Conference brochure.