Welcome to the winter 2015 edition of eMuse!

In this edition...

• The Summer Community 
• Literacy for Life: the Best of Teacher Leadership 
• Graphic Literature Interactive Workshop 
• Digital Tools and Techniques for Literacy Instruction
• Telling Our Stories/Raising Our Voices: From Anecdote to Action
• Family Literacy Initiative Training Institute
• Family Writing Fun Night! 
• EMWP Partners with Litchfield Elementary on Major Federal Grant 
• DePaul Students Explore and Blog About Chicago Yoga 
• Professional Development Updates (Part 2 of 3) 
• Turn around, So You Can Find the “Open Door” and the Rest of Life 

Read more!

The Summer Community

Bill Tucker, Director

Make no mistake: the Writing Teacher’s Leadership Institute is a close relative of the Summer Invitational Institute of bygone years, but it has evolved into a variety of the species. Now everyone (even alumni/ae) is invited, demonstrations are planned and performed in teams, duration is condensed to three weeks, and teacher leadership is a prominent theme. Because we had two SI veterans attending with the first-timers in 2014 and because we had a stream of seven of our own teacher leaders describing their leadership roles, we have begun to think of the summer institute as a leadership community.

Teachers are now coming to the summer institute to find their niche in leadership: as writers and advocates, as consultants in writing, as classroom researchers, as school improvement leaders, as literacy coaches, and as family literacy presenters.

One other difference: the free institute has gone the way of the hula hoop (oops, the hula hoop is not dead, if you ask Erin Umpstead). This summer you will pay $1950 for three graduate credits or $750 for state clock hours. As I predicted, 2014 was the last summer of the free ride.

The dates? June 29 - July 17, 2015, 9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m., Monday- Friday, (Campus Closed Friday, July 3, 2015). The location? EMU Student Center 320. That has not changed.

It is not too early to approach your principals or department heads about subsidizing your vacation, er. . . professional development. The familiar application is attached, but the experience will be novel and inspiring. We promise!! Read more!

Literacy for Life: the Best of Teacher Leadership

Bill Tucker, Director

The best teacher leader models are coming your way this spring. Four sessions on Saturday mornings in Pray-Harrold show how timely and inventive our teachers can be.

In February you'll find what teachers have learned about advocating for their own profession from a workshop last summer. Cathy Fleischer will keynote a group that includes Lisa Eddy, Erin Umpstead, Kris Gedeon, Lauren Nizol, Beth Shaum, and Jeff Taylor. Meanwhile Michelle Vanston will continue her highly practical series on implementing a reading-writing workshop with Making Writing Partnerships Work (see attachment).

In March the Special Education Inquiry group will be led by Professor Rhonda Kraai, a specialist in Cognitive Impairment. This group, including Karen Hoffman, Dawn Izzi and Judy Wycoff, will focus on case studies of individual students who required special interventions in writing.

April brings a focus on digital writing, echoing Troy Hicks' presentation at the Literacy Summit at the WISD April 23. Karen Chichester and Michelle Vanston will bring the latest applications for digital writing for all grades K-college.

We'll finish the year in May with our annual Google workshop, helping teachers implement useful applications from Google-forms.

See the links to announcements and the Spring schedule for details. Don't miss this showcase of the best teacher leaders in southeastern Michigan! Read more!

Graphic Literature Interactive Workshop

Pam McCombs

Would you like to incorporate the sequential-art-narratives of comics and graphic novels into your teaching? Well join four EMWP fellows, K-13 writing instructors this June 24-26. In this interactive workshop you will be immersed into activities that introduce you to visual literacy, and get you reading and writing comics with the ultimate goal to create your own sequential art memoirs.
Through reading and discussing various resources on sequential-art-narratives, participants will gain a complete understanding of the value comics and graphic novels can hold within our classrooms. Sources to be used:

• Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and Making Comics
• Will Eisner’s Comics and the Sequential Art Narrative
• Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics
• Rocco Versaci’s “Literary Literacy and the Role of the Comic book” from Teaching Visual Literacy
• Lynda Barry’s What it is

Read more!

Digital Tools and Techniques for Literacy Instruction

Karen Chichester and Michelle Vanston

Technology has changed our classrooms. Schools have gone Google. Students are bringing their own devices to class. Chromebooks and iPads abound. So, how we can incorporate these into our literacy instruction? Join an elementary teacher and a secondary school teacher for three days of hands-on use of technology from June 17-19.

In this workshop, we will immerse ourselves in digital technology and examine best practices for their use in the classroom. We will use student artifacts, our source texts and online resources to guide our discussion, experimentation, and collaboration. By the end of our third day, participants will have new resources for classroom use, a better understanding of technology best practices, and have revamped one lesson or unit of study to include technology.

For source material, we will use

• Create, Compose, Connect! by Jeremy Hyler and Troy Hicks 
• Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts Across Media and Genres by Troy Hicks
• Selected online texts.

Facilitators: Karen Chichester and Michelle Vanston, EMWP Teacher Consultants. Read more!