Forty years ago, this organization was founded as The Teachers College Writing Project. We were housed in beautiful, scruffy rooms on the third floor of Horace Mann, and staff developers met there to study writing instruction, and to take writing process to schools in the neighboring areas. Many of the founding staff emerged from the MFA program at Columbia, and everyone’s passion was writing. A belief in the significance of every child’s voice, and writing as a learnable craft, were key to our early work.
Since then, our work expanded, first into reading, when we became the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, and then into content literacies, and multiliteracies, and digital literacies, and anti-oppressive education. We’ve broadened our research, our fields of study, and our communities. We’ve also learned to value collaboration and varied perspectives. There are complex and varied pedagogies for teaching children to be critical thinkers, confident writers, powerful readers.
We have a new name to reflect our goals in expanding what literacy means — that it is a human right, that it is nuanced and changeable, that teaching literacy is an ever-evolving process. Advancing Literacy is more than a new name. To mark our next phase in literacy professional development, our interest in modernizing what literacy means, and our deep coalition with other departments at Teachers College, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project (TCRWP) will transition to the ‘Advancing Literacy’ initiative at Teachers College. The Advancing Literacy unit will be housed within TC’s Continuing Professional Studies - where the original TC Writing Project began. Over the next few months, you’ll begin to see ‘Advancing Literacy’ on our site, resources, and tools. In this capacity we embrace our history, our far-flung roots in origins such as the National Writing Project, our traditions of bringing educators together to study, and of teaching and learning in your classrooms.