Then "the session notes" of the previous day are read out and the day's schedule is announced. These are done by participants in turn. We cannot forget that there is a food table in the classroom for all. Members in turn take care of the table, suppllying of the food every morning, which always give the session a friendly and relaxing mood as well as the significant energy source.
During the morning, variety of topics are taken up. Sometime lecturers including professional writers are invited and provide participants the occasions to discuss over the philosophy and technique of writing activities from lots of view points. Workshops including "poetry writing" encourage participants to challenge the genres not very familiar to them in their daily teaching cycles. On these occasions, participants (usually giving instructions as teachers in classrooms) get the chance to feel the situation of students, and see the activity of writing with naive wonder and discoveries.
In the afternoon, sharing of what participants write is one of the main activities. In small groups according to the category of their actual work places (K-12), participants read and give feedback to each other. This is thrilling, exciting, instructive, and very rewarding. To find out that there are "readers" is indispensable to make writing activity meaningful to individual writers (no matter what one's writing status is--professional, amature, teacher, student....) Everybody is allowed to write on what s/he likes. Personally my topic is "Virginia Discovery Journey" in which I write my experience in Charlottesville, Virginia, as a visitor form Japan. Through the sharing, what we give and take to and from our peers is invaluable.
The regular participants of CVWP are required to do their "inservice" during the last weeks of the session. They have conference with instructors in advance over the topic, methodology, reference and so on in advance, issue full report of the research in print for distribution, and after the presentation they get feed back from plural members of the session.
At the end of the session, the editorial board of the Project (all volunteers) publishes the anthology of the participants. They (including the instructor and the visitor--me!) contribute the most favorite pieces of their writing. In addition, "the T-shirt committee" very democratically collects the opinions of the participants and money to make CVWP 1997 version of a t-shirt for all.
For more information contact Professor Joe Strzepek, director of Central Virginia Writing Project (jes7b@virginia.edu).
Participants and instructors watching presentation together.