"Great Human Power or Magic"

By Melissa Ludtke/Bread Loaf

As school starts this fall in Tununak, a tiny Eskimo community on the windswept coast of Alaska, Teacher Ben Orr is planning to invite elderly storytellers into the classroom so his young students can learn and then write down traditional legends and lore of their vanishing culture. For Donna Maxim's third-graders in Boothbay, Me., writing will become a tool in science and social studies as students record observations, questions and reactions about what they discover each day. In Eagle Butte, S.D., Geri Gutwein has designed a writing project in which her ninth-grade students exchange letters with third-graders about stories they have read together. This year a few of her students will sit with Cheyenne women who tell tales as they knit together, their heritage becoming grist for today's young writers.

Although these teachers are separated by thousands of miles, their methods of trying to encourage children to write spring from a common source: the Bread Loaf School of English. There, near Vermont's Middlebury College, grade school and high school teachers give up part of their vacations each summer to spend six weeks brainstorming, studying and trading experiences as they try to devise new methods of getting their pupils to write. Says Dixie Goswami, a Clemson University English professor who heads Bread Loaf's program in writing: "We have nothing against 'skill-and-drill' writing curricula, except they don't work." Instead, Bread Loaf graduates have quietly created one of the nation's most inventive programs to encourage student writers.

The Bread Loaf literature and writing program began in 1920 as a summer retreat where English teachers studied for advanced degrees. Until the late 1970s most were teachers from elite Eastern prep schools. Bread Loaf "was failing in its social responsibility," says Paul Cubeta, a Middlebury humanities professor who has directed the program since 1965. "So we went looking in rural America for potential educational leaders." Foundation funds were raised to help defray the $2,500 cost for tuition and board. Over the past ten years nearly 500 rural instructors have studied in the shadow of the distinctly flattened mountain that gives the school its name. This summer 73 came to Bread Loaf from small towns in 32 states.

Bread Loafers are convinced that children are inspired to write well when they have information to communicate. In Gilbert, S.C., for instance, students interviewed old-timers to discover what life in their small towns was like many decades ago. The students' narrative accounts, vividly describing everything from butter making to courtship and marriage, were published in a magazine they named Sparkleberry. This summer at Gilbert's Fourth of July Peach Festival, the homemade magazines sold like hot cobblers.

Many of the new ideas that teachers took away from Bread Loaf seemed in danger of withering back home, remembers Cubeta. "We needed to devise a way for them to go back with support for their projects and for each other." One result was an idea called BreadNet: by setting up a network of word processors, Bread Loaf-trained teachers could instantaneously connect their classrooms. Last year the project lifted off when a charitable trust donated $1.5 million for that and other programs.

The new national hookup provided evidence for another Bread Loaf belief: children will write freshly when given a new audience. Students in the tiny ranching community of Wilsall, Mont., began writing to children in Pittsburgh about farm life in winter. "Cows aren't smart enough to paw through the snow like horses, so you have to feed them," one child explained. A Sioux student on a reservation in South Dakota wrote candidly about what is happening to one branch of the tribe: "Life for the Lakota people is going in a downward direction . . . To control it would take great human power or magic."

This fall 68 teachers in 33 states will be able to send their students' writing electronically into distant classrooms. Later in the year, the fourth edition of Voices Across the Wires, a student-edited collection of BreadNet writing, will be published. "Having real situations to write about has really changed their attitude," says Joanne Tulonen, whose Wilsall students were among the first to use BreadNet. "Before, their writing was artificial. Now they see themselves as people with information worth sharing."