Supporting educators through a professional network dedicated to becoming writers and teachers of writing.
The Summer Writing Institute
We describe the SWI as a summer writing camp for teachers. As other university classes are settling in for the day, we are often heading out, writing notebooks in hand. We spend lots of time outside, experiencing a walking curriculum as a writing curriculum, where historical, socioecological, inequities and injustices to relational to place and responsive, movement and multimodal writing and literacies as embodied, and developing ideas for place-writing in contexts. We engage in practices as writers—morning pages, individual writing time, and workshopping our writing in small writing groups—that support our teaching of writing, enhanced an off-campus writing marathon, workshops with special guests, readings and conversations about pedagogy, and designing place-writing projects to enact in schools/communities. “Becoming Writers: Place, Power, and Pedagogy in Teaching Writing” (EDUB 5342/7130) is a 6-credit hour course open to all (PBDE, Master’s and PhD students), regardless of prior writing experience, teaching areas, or professional roles.
2025 Ripple Effects Edition
The Summer Writing Institute (SWI) 2025 was dedicated to water—as writers and teachers of writers, we individually and collectively imagined what it means to write and right water (in)justices.
During the two weeks of the SWI, we spent a lot of time outside and in place, as we walked beside, moved like, painted with, listened to, talked and wrote about water from our lives, memories, and as part of our own bodies. We connected to and through our relationships with water and writing, deepening our shared responsibilities for teaching about, caring for, and protecting water and student voice during this precarious time of climate crisis.
Together, we realized the important ripple effects that can happen when we as teachers intentionally notice, wonder, wander, and write about our relationships with and commitments to water, and we plan for how to invite students, schools, and communities to do the same.
2023 Murals, Monuments, and Maples Edition
We were back in person, and on campus, for the 2023 SWI. To expand the breadth of our critical place inquiry, we introduced writers to three M's: Murals, Monuments and Maples, as ways to draw attention to the social, cultural, political, historical, material, creative, and ecological inquiries that can be facilitated through place-walking and place-writing. With daily movement activities (led by a former SWI participant and dance educator Teaching Assistant), we focused on embodiment, consent, affect, and well-being. Becoming more attuned through moving, knowing, and writing as embodied and creative practices deepened our engagement and relations with place as bodies of writing/writers.
To prompt inquiries into the socioecological and sociopolitical, we walked with Indigenous and non-Indigenous artivists in significant places in the city and on campus. Through facilitated walks, playfulness, and public art installations, we were enacting more sociomaterial theories of writing, embodying critical and creative meaning-making as individual and collective projects. We created an Arc-GIS story map with educators creating and sharing Write Out pedagogy projects they designed for their students.
2021 Online Edition
When our SWI had to be offered online in 2021 due to COVID-19, we re-designed the course as an experience with walking curriculum. In preparation, we read Writing for Pleasure by Ross Young & Felicity Ferguson, Writing Toward Home by Georgia Heard, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop by Felicia Rose Chavez, A Walking Curriculum by Gillian Judson, and articles from a special issue of the Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies on Walking: Attuning to an Earthly Curriculum. We discovered that walking in our own neighborhoods and communities–with focused invitations to be attentive to our senses, to consider what’s lovely/unlovely, to look critically at our human impact, to create mappings to inquire into issues of spatial justice—prompted powerful multimodal writing and teaching demonstrations. Once again, we emerged from the Summer Writing Institute changed. Our readings, our writing, our individual and collective work related to colonization, education, and Truth & Reconciliation, and our critical inquiries into place, power, and writing challenged and encouraged us, invited and inspired us to take risks, and to wander and wonder into new pedagogical territories. We learned powerful lessons about what place can teach us when we go outside, when we attune ourselves to listening differently, when we look closely and again with new lenses and critical perspectives, when we slow down and unplug and realize new forms of connectedness, and when we write--open to knowing and becoming and new possibility. Once again, we look forward to hearing where our writing, walking, and critical place-pedagogies take us.
2018 Park Edition
In July 2018, we invited a group of 24 educators to explore place through situating ourselves as writers in/with place. Our site was King’s Park, close enough to campus to walk for daily time to write, to meet in writing groups, and to engage in inquiry. From the successful 50-year history of the National Writing Project, we have learned that to be effective teachers of writing, teachers must experience the process themselves. Time to write was an important part of the institute, as was time to participate in writing workshops and writing conferences with small groups and with the instructors.
Like Coleman (2017) in Yardwork, we hoped King’s Park would become a “backyard” for our inquiry into place. This was about looking closely and inquiring into the relationships we share with place and place shares with us. This was about coming to better understand place through study and writing in many forms. This was about creating something new as a process of becoming-with place in some way: through a new awareness of the history, animal life, and plant species of the park; of the land, river, and waterways; of the economic, political, spiritual and storied dimensions of place; and of issues of special interest, accessibility, eco-justice, policy and policing, monuments and memorializing, marshlands and lawns, rivers and ponds, birds, turtles, dogs and insects.
It was about letting an inquiry lead us through our curiosity, observations, conversations, research, and being open. It was about listening in new ways: expanding the ways we see and what we pay attention to; documenting through pictures, audio, video, notes, drawings; posing questions and coming to learn through story, archival research, systematic study, interview, and using new tools. It was an invitation to be wild, organic, experimental, multimodal, and reflective in their writing.
2016 Blended Fall Edition
Having hosted 2 summer institutes, it was time to try something else for Fall 2016: a blended course (3 credit hours) offered online with 3 Saturday face-to-face workshops. Fifteen amazing educators signed up for the experience. Again, it was a wonderfully diverse group, from early years teachers to those who teach in high school classrooms and those who work as administrators and coaches to support literacy and professional learning in their schools and divisions. We introduced ourselves online through sharing an initial piece of writing in response to questions and mentor texts like these: What languages define you? (Amy Tan, "Mother Tongue"); Who raised you? (Kelly Norman Ellis, "I Was Raised by Women"); What do you know about yourself? (Tucker Bryant, "Some Facts About Myself"); What do you believe? (National Public Radio, "This I Believe"); and What objects have meaning to you? (Monica M. Clark, "Everyday Objects").
We met in person on October 1 for a Manitoba Writing Project tradition: the writing marathon. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights was our site, and our day there provoked and challenged us as writers and educators. On October 22 we met again, thrilled to have a beautiful day for our outdoor "writing in place" workshop. We began and ended the day at the Oodena Circle, sharing our writing in a meeting place that has brought people together for thousands of years. In between meetings, our writing online was inspired by our reading of Lifewriting and Literary Metissage as an Ethos for our Times (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers, & Leggo, 2009). Our final gathering was a writing retreat held at the Faculty of Education on a snowy but sunny December 10. Together, we explored the need for critical literacy in our classrooms and lives, shared our pedagogy projects with one another, wrote in solidarity with International Human Rights Day, and ended with a writing circle read around. We are writers!
View our anthology here.
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2015 Writing For/As Human Rights Edition
It was an amazing two weeks with another group of 14 educators, all with varied backgrounds and interests in writing and teaching writing. We connected quickly on the first day of the Institute, starting with a lively "speed dating" activity, writing "rambling autobiographies" (Rief) of our lives as writers, and turning those into six-word memoirs after a few rounds of "workshopping a draft" (Perl & Schwartz, 2014)—and that was just the morning! Highlights of our 10 days together included the amazing "demonstration" workshops that each teacher led, the luxury of dedicated time everyday to writing and developing our identities as writers, the growth and encouragement experienced through our writing groups, and our writing marathon at The Forks. We wish to thank all of our speakers and special guests for their contributions to the Institute: administrator Ricki Valcourt, Professor Karen Busby, Dr. Jessica Senehi, storyteller Jamie Oliverio, educator Lindsay Brown, and archivist Anne Lindsay.
It was also wonderful to welcome back several Manitoba Writing Project teachers from our 2014 Institute, who shared the work they have been doing in writing for/as social justice and human rights in their classrooms and communities.
View our anthology here.
2014 First Edition
The inaugural Summer Writing Institute (July 2014) included fourteen participants who represented a broad range of teaching interests, levels, expertise, and experiences. The group included early years, middle years, and senior years teachers, as well as those whose interests are in education more broadly. Participants enrolled as part of a PBDE or to earn credit towards their M.Ed or PhD programs*. All readily admitted that a writing institute sounded daunting, but all were eager.
The focus of the Institute was to have its participants, the majority of whom were practicing teachers, to consider the value of writing, expression, authorship, and identity as a means for student articulation as well as empowerment. In this vein, the institute placed particular emphasis on writing as, and for, social justice with topics that included multiculturalism, gender issues, Aboriginal education, and incorporating English language learners, among many others.
For participants, these elements contribute to a memorable and even transformative experiences. For instance, a “writing marathon” at the Manitoba Museum generated for two participants the writing of powerful poems exploring Manitoba’s treaties. Sparked by a presentation given by Dr. Maureen Matthews, the curator of the museum’s special exhibit “We Are All Treaty People”, and a workshop on artifact writing provided at the museum by another Institute participant, the poems are now published online in the Institute Anthology. With Cree filmmaker Kevin Lee Burton, participants explored the possibilities of film to merge and juxtapose the languages, sounds, images, landscapes, and cultures of Aboriginal youth. With archivist Dr. Greg Bak, educators considered how critical inquiry through “archival thinking” could engage Manitoban students in learning about the history and legacy of Indian Residential Schools. With local storyteller and educator Marc Kuly, participants were invited to explore issues of social justice and human rights through narrative, drawing on the power of storytelling as pedagogy for truth and reconciliation.
