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The Sun Belt Writing Project is a National Writing Project site promoting the teaching of writing to improve learning in America's schools.

Moving in New Directions

By: NWP Staff
Publication: The Voice, Vol. 6, No. 4
Date: September-October 2001

Summary: The leaders of the NWP's eight newest sites are showcased, highlighting their individual backgrounds, what brought them to the role of director, their goals as directors, and more.

. . . And just as new sites come in, so do new directors to guide them. Joining the National Writing Project from a variety of experiences, directions, and backgrounds, site directors are the people who face those hurdles, jump those hoops--and somehow convince an entire community of teachers and writers to join them.

Presented here are brief introductions to the directors of the eight new NWP sites. Each piece touches on a variety of topics, such as what brought this director to teaching, what the director hopes to achieve through his site, how a particular background has benefited a director, etc. Admittedly, in such a small amount of text, it is impossible to do more than offer a glimpse of what makes each director unique. Acknowledging that, then, we offer these sketches as an illustration of the wealth of personalities that enrich the NWP's directorial roles.

Alyson Whyte, Director
Sun Belt Writing Project
Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama

"Nearly 25 years ago now, I loaded up the Olds Cutlass I had 'inherited' from my grandmother, drove from Sacramento over the Carquinez Bridge to Berkeley, and started what still ranks as one of the best years of my life," says Alyson Whyte, new director of the Sun Belt Writing Project in Auburn, Alabama.

That year, 1978-79, Whyte took part in the Bay Area Writing Project's (BAWP) fifth-year credential program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her teachers included Grace Maertins, Ken Lane, Mary Ann Smith, Rebekah Caplan, Fran Claggett, Walter Loban, and Lily Wong Filmore. "That foundation has shaped more than 20 years of public school teaching, university teaching, and research--and who I am privately as much as who I am publicly. My experience in BAWP was the path to an integrated, creative adult life."

In 2001, Whyte joined Auburn University and is an assistant professor of English education in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching in the College of Education. Before coming to Auburn, she taught grades 7-12 English language arts in Tucson, Arizona, and worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Foundations and Policy Studies at Florida State University. Whyte earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1999. Her dissertation was a study of the management of writing response groups in high school classrooms. In addition to teaching, Whyte has coauthored four college writing textbooks with William L. Rivers, Stanford University. Her most recent publications include an article on interaction processes in the spring 2001 Journal for the Art of Teaching and a chapter on writing to learn in Writing Across the Curriculum in Secondary Classrooms: Teaching from a Diverse Perspective, edited by Harriet Arzu Scarborough (Merrill Publishing, 2000).

"My goal as the new director of Sun Belt," Whyte says, "is to preserve the strong tradition of this site, which was initially established by Dr. Richard Graves. Dr. Graves has officially 'retired,' but he gives unstintingly of himself whenever I ask, and he infuses us with the heart and spirit of Sun Belt. Collectively, Cathy Buckhalt and John Pennisi, Sun Belt's co-directors, have 28 years of experience as teacher-consultants, and their expertise and commitment never fails us. And we have a true community of writing project teachers here in eastern Alabama, which reaches back for decades. I want to see the Sun Belt tradition continue and thrive.

Excerpted from The Voice. For the full article, go to www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/224