{"id":201155,"date":"2018-08-28T13:29:30","date_gmt":"2018-08-28T17:29:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=201155"},"modified":"2023-07-11T13:36:33","modified_gmt":"2023-07-11T17:36:33","slug":"10-questions-with-the-director-of-the-connecticut-writing-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2018\/08\/10-questions-with-the-director-of-the-connecticut-writing-project\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Questions With the Director of the Connecticut Writing Project"},"content":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0our recurring\u00a0<\/em>10 Questions series<\/a><\/u><\/em>, the Neag School catches up with students, alumni, faculty, and others throughout the year to offer a glimpse into their Neag School experience and their current career, research, or community activities.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Jason Courtmanche \u201991 (CLAS), \u201906 Ph.D. has been serving in a variety of capacities at the University of Connecticut for 23 years. A lecturer in the University\u2019s English department, he also is assistant coordinator of the Early College Experience English program and affiliate faculty in the Neag School\u2019s Department of Curriculum and Instruction. He advises English majors who want to be secondary English teachers, including those who want to enroll or are enrolled in Neag School programs.<\/p>\n

He received his bachelor of arts in English from UConn in 1991 and in 1992 also completed the\u00a0Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates<\/a><\/u>\u00a0(TCPCG) when it was still a nondegree program in the School of Education. After having earned tenure as a high school English teacher, he returned to UConn to complete his Ph.D. in English in 2006.\u00a0He also had attended Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif., for his master of arts in English.<\/p>\n

\"Jason
Jason Courtmanche \u201991 (CLAS), \u201906 Ph.D., right, from the UConn Department of English and the Connecticut Writing Project, congratulates one of the 2018 Letters About Literature contest honorees earlier this spring in Hartford, Conn. (Shawn Kornegay\/Neag School)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Courtmanche primarily serves as director of the\u00a0Connecticut Writing Project<\/a><\/u>\u00a0(CWP), which immerses Connecticut teachers in an intensive writing program where they grow as writers, learn about teaching writing, and have the opportunity to become published in one of CWP\u2019s literary magazines. The foundation of this work involves running CWP\u2019s\u00a0Summer Institute<\/a><\/u>, a six-credit program for teachers focused on improving the teaching of writing through research and the development their own portfolios of writing. Courtmanche also serves as coordinator for the Library of Congress\u2019 annual\u00a0Letters About Literature<\/a><\/u>\u00a0contest, for which students in grades four through 12 write about how a piece of literature affected their lives. In recent years, Courtmanche and fellow contest coordinator\u00a0Douglas Kaufman<\/a>, along with the Neag School and English Department as co-sponsors, increased contest participation in Connecticut by 53 percent.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re the director of the Connecticut Writing Project, which publi<\/strong>shes teacher and student work in literary magazines. Why are these resources important for teachers and writers across the state?\u00a0<\/strong>There\u2019s a lot of research that says a real audience and a real purpose provide tremendous motivation for students to actually put in more time and more effort and take their writing more seriously.\u00a0Getting published and having an audience is an incredibly empowering and validating thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur reasons for writing aren\u2019t purely economic;
\nthey are personal, they are community, they are civic.
\nAt times, when the economy is weak,
\npeople see humanities degrees as a luxury.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2014Jason Courtmanche, \u201991 (CLAS), \u201906 Ph.D.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There\u2019s been a push for STEM-focused education programs. Do you think writing and reading have been devalued? Why or why not?\u00a0<\/strong>In recent years, there\u2019s been a corporate reform asking educators to be an engine of economic renewal, so the language is about making people capable of writing for business purposes \u2014 which shouldn\u2019t be the be-all and end-all for writing instruction. We think more broadly about what writing and English are. We really think about students being career- and college-ready, but also community-ready, like writing for the sake of civic engagement. Our reasons for writing aren\u2019t purely economic; they are personal, they are community, they are civic. At times, when the economy is weak, people see humanities degrees as a luxury.<\/p>\n

You are the first in your family to pursue a doctoral degree. What made you want to enroll in a Ph.D. in program at UConn?\u00a0<\/strong>I knew so little about graduate school because no one in my family had done a Ph.D., and I thought to myself, \u201cI\u2019m 30 years old and if I do a Ph.D. program, I should do it now.\u201d I did it by working really hard and not sleeping very much.\u00a0It took me seven years and an extra semester. As an undergrad, a lot of my professors told me I should pursue a Ph.D., and I didn\u2019t know how to go back and dedicate myself as a scholar. To get a Ph.D. in a content area was a mystery to me.<\/p>\n

You were one of the last classes to graduate from the School\u2019s Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates when it was a nondegree program. Why did you enroll in the program and how has that shaped your career?<\/strong>\u00a0For today\u2019s Integrated Bachelor\u2019s\/Master\u2019s [IB\/M] students, they really have to arrive at UConn knowing they want a career in education. Not every student is this certain as a first- or second-year college student. For me, that\u2019s what was great about TCPCG. I was simply not that certain about my goals as an undergrad. I was a good student, but I wasn\u2019t really ambitious.\u00a0Going into senior year, I hadn\u2019t given my post-undergraduate career a whole lot of thought. \u2026 I learned about [TCPCG], and I found out I was good at teaching. I taught at an alternative high school, and that was a great experience.<\/p>\n

The other thing I liked about TCPCG [a one-year graduate program] is that its students have many more options as undergrads to do other things. As an undergrad, I wrote and edited for the\u00a0Daily Campus<\/em>, worked for ConnPIRG, minored in sociology. These things wouldn\u2019t have been as possible had I been in the School of Education [which at the time did not offer a dual-degree IB\/M program]. But without clinicals and student teaching and education classes in addition to English classes, such options are easier to pursue, and at the end of the program a student can bring those experiences to their future classroom.<\/p>\n

\"Jason
Jason Courtmanche \u201991 (CLAS), \u201906 Ph.D., left, meets with best-selling author Wally Lamb \u201972 (CLAS), \u201977 MA. (Photo courtesy of Jason Courtmanche)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Why have you dedicated more than 20 years to working as a professor and advisor at UConn?\u00a0<\/strong>There\u2019s much that I find rewarding about teaching writing at UConn. I think one of the most rewarding things comes from working with students who are not English majors and who have maybe had bad experiences in the past with English, and helping them to have a positive experience with literature and writing.<\/p>\n

Last fall, I had one student, a senior math major who was taking my class because she needed a writing course to graduate. She came to my office hours during the first week and was literally trembling as she spoke with me because she had so much anxiety about taking an English class. She told me repeatedly what a bad writer she was and how scared she was of failing. I asked the students to write a series of 750-word op-eds that discussed current events through the lens of one or more works of literature from the course. This student wrote several successful pieces, but her best one described the normalization of violence she experienced visiting Israel, which she compared in her op-ed to the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud chapters in\u00a0Adventures of Huckleberry Finn<\/em>. She was incredibly proud of her paper and radically changed her attitude not just about English but about herself as a literate person. My job doesn\u2019t get much more rewarding than that!<\/p>\n

Where does your passion for teaching writing come from?\u00a0<\/strong>I think it would be the contact I had with the [former] director of the Connecticut Writing Project, Mary Mackley.\u00a0She was one of my most important mentors as a student and eventual educator. I had two classes with her as an undergraduate student that dramatically influenced the way I came to teach. Later, I studied with her during the summer of 1999 as a graduate student, and those courses became my entr\u00e9 into the Ph. D. program at UConn. From the fall of 1999 through the summer of 2002, I worked for the writing project under Mary\u2019s supervision while I also taught high school full time and pursued my Ph. D. She and I co-taught the Summer Institute in 2000, 2001, and 2002, and during the academic year, I was the editor of\u00a0Connecticut Student Writers<\/a><\/u><\/em>. I learned much from her about being the director of a writing project.<\/p>\n

My past teaching experiences at an alternative high school also influenced my passion for teaching writing.\u00a0So much of that instruction had to be very student-centered and dynamic, and I try to be that way in all of my classes.\u00a0My focus and my passion are really teaching writing more than teaching literature.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s much that I find rewarding about teaching writing at UConn. I think one of the most rewarding things comes from working with students who are not English majors and who have maybe had bad experiences in the past with English, and helping them to have a positive experience with literature and writing.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why is it important for teachers who teach writing to write themselves?\u00a0How does that influence and develop them as professionals?\u00a0<\/strong>The question lies at the heart of the mission of the National Writing Project. At its most basic, a writing teacher who is a writer is an expert in her field who then shares her expertise with her students or with other teachers. If every teacher of writing were themselves a writer, we\u2019d see no more five-paragraph essays, or rigid formulae for genre, or rigid procedures for process, because instruction would be based on the organic experience of the writer who happens to be teaching others how to write. But because this is not widespread, we have canned writing programs that cost school districts scandalous sums of money and create writing-averse students like the math major in my earlier example. It\u2019s no surprise to me that English teachers like Vicky Nordlund at Rockville High or Danielle Pieratti at South Windsor High who are themselves successful, published writers produce students who year in and year out win writing awards and get published in various venues.<\/p>\n

How have you been able to continue growing as a writer?\u00a0<\/strong>One of the ways I\u2019ve grown as a writer was by starting a\u00a0blog<\/a>\u00a0about teaching writing.\u00a0I publish between 28 and 30 750-word columns a year, and at first no one was reading it, but now I\u2019ve gotten it to a point where it gets read by hundreds of Connecticut, mostly high school English, teachers, and it gets a really good following.\u00a0That\u2019s become a really exciting thing for me, but I do have a very specific audience I\u2019m writing for, and that\u2019s become an important thing for me. I read voraciously about the education system of Connecticut and always am thinking about what I want to write about.<\/p>\n

What advice do you have for writers?\u00a0<\/strong>Get involved in a writing group. One of the myths is the myth of a solitary author, but nobody really writes in a vacuum.\u00a0Most authors write in writing groups to get feedback. Sometimes writing groups don\u2019t work, but when people take them seriously and put in the effort, they work exceptionally.<\/p>\n

What are some challenges that come with teaching writing?\u00a0<\/strong>People\u2019s fears. People are so afraid that the English teacher is going to criticize every spoken word and language use. It instills fear in a lot of people. [To help people to get over their fear of writing] I try to provide opportunities to write without penalty.\u00a0I emphasize feedback and response. I try to structure the course in a way where I allow them to write things they have an interest and experience in, and they\u2019re given so many opportunities to improve, so the occasion for writing isn\u2019t punitive.<\/p>\n

Learn more about the Connecticut Writing Project at Storrs at\u00a0cwp.uconn.edu<\/a><\/u>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Read other installments of the\u00a010 Questions\u00a0series here.<\/a><\/u><\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jason Courtmanche \u201991 (CLAS), Ph.D. \u201906 has been serving in a variety of capacities at the University of Connecticut for 23 years. A lecturer in the University\u2019s English department, an assistant coordinator of the Early College Experience English program, and affiliate faculty in the Neag School\u2019s Department of Curriculum and Instruction, he primarily serves as director of the Connecticut Writing Project (CWP), which immerses Connecticut teachers in an intensive writing program where they grow as writers, learn about teaching writing, and have the opportunity to become published in one of CWP\u2019s literary magazines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_crdt_document":"","wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2424,1855],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2444],"class_list":["post-201155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neag-community-engagement","category-neag"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-05 04:37:35","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201155"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":201156,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201155\/revisions\/201156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201155"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=201155"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=201155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}