Whether it is through a teacher, captivating prose, or a life experience, the inspiration to write begins with a spark. With support from a CU-Boulder Outreach Award, the CU Writing Outreach program ignites creativity at local elementary schools by helping young students discover the writer inside of each of them.
“Our aim is to provide a unique service- learning experience for graduate and undergraduate students, build collaboration between the university and surrounding area schools, and offer a variety of resources to support learning through the literary arts,” said Julie Carr, associate professor of English and CU Writing Outreach faculty advisor.
During six- to eight-week residencies in the elementary schools, CU-Boulder students share their creative writing knowledge and experiences with students. The Writing Outreach Program provides CU students opportunities to gain experience in literature education while sharing the resources of the English department. Elementary school children and their teachers enjoy the extra attention and benefit from additional writing instruction.
Carr offers in-class support and teacher training for the CU undergraduate and graduate student writing mentors. She led a similar program in New York City before beginning the program at CU. Through her experiences Carr has witnessed the reciprocal benefits for the students on both ends of the academic spectrum. Students gain new understandings of writing, and the project promotes a sense of civic responsibility and community involvement for CU faculty and student mentors.
“Years of teaching children still informs how I teach young adults,” Carr said. “My students are learning as much as the kids they teach.”
During their weekly classroom visits, pairs of CU students introduce a variety of writing styles. Classes often begin with the children reading and discussing the craft of writing, followed by analyses of specific literary techniques demonstrated in the readings. For example, one week the CU mentors may develop the children’s persuasive writing skills by instructing the students to write a letter requesting admission into the Academy of American Adventurers; the next week the lesson may engage the young students’ metaphorical minds by instructing them to describe a peach in all of its juicy details.
The young pupils come to think of themselves as writers, and at the end of each residency the students choose a batch of their favorite works to revise and publish in a bound, class anthology. The CU students visit their classrooms for one last visit of the semester at the class “book party.”
“I love to read and there is nothing better than reading stories and poems written by kids,” Carr said. “It is so energizing. It fuels me as a teacher.”
MFA student and CU Writing Outreach residency mentor/organizer Collin Schuster agreed.
“At the end of the residencies, we get these notes from students thanking us,” he said. “Sometimes they say that they didn’t see themselves as writers before, but now they do. And that’s where it eventually ends up—they get published.”
According to Schuster, both the CU mentors and the elementary school students leave the writing activities invigorated and the teachers they work with have been amazing.
“My sense is there is a real liveliness for everyone when we leave the classroom—for the kids, for the teachers, and us,” he said. “I call it the ‘wild sauce’. I totally love it. It’s really fun to be a part of the car ride back to campus. I think we are all pretty jazzed.”