Project Description

This page offers a better understanding of our vision for this project, as well as some links to other areas related to this grant's area of focus. 

The Project:

"K-18 Contact" is a new, joint project of the English Department and the Montgomery County Public Schools, funded by a Virginia Tech ReachOUT Grant.  Its immediate goal is to link public school and university teachers and their students through a series of interactive web pages.  These pages will become a site for the exchange of information and ideas and for making initial contacts -- out of which, we hope, a variety of creative partnerships and collaborations will ultimately grow.  Other Virginia Tech academic departments will be added in the future, and we expect to include additional school districts as the project grows.

Some Working Principles and Assumptions:

Education is a continuous process--from kindergarten through graduate school and beyond. Institutional barriers obscure this important fact and make it hard for public school and university teachers to identify areas of common interest and concern. Outreach efforts based on a top-down, "expertise delivery" model--without an adequate understanding of needs and classroom contexts--are doomed to failure. On the other hand, we have not yet adequately tapped the creative potential of teacher-to-teacher collaboration. Technology offers us a way to introduce ourselves, to share resources and to create new teaching/learning communities.

The Possibilities . . .

"K-18 Contact" is what the participants make of it. The project does not represent a commitment to provide a slate of services or resources. Still, the possibilities for what could develop from the partnership are endless. Here are some suggestions that have already emerged:

Public school classrooms could serve as sites for service-learning or field studies connected with undergraduate classes. The same kind of collaboration could be carried out electronically, as has already been the case with children's literature classes in the LIT program. English department interns could carry through a writing project of service to the larger community--for example, a parent-teacher newsletter; advanced composition or technical writing students might benefit from working on a grant-writing team. Public school and university teachers might come together in real or virtual reading groups to discuss children's literature, science fiction, contemporary critical theory or broader curricular issues. Public school and university teachers could build semester-long collaborations out of these initial conversations and present their projects at regional conferences--for example, at the Children's Literature conference to be held at Hotel Roanoke in 2000. University faculty could compile lists of useful web sites for teachers of Shakespeare, Stephen Crane, Appalachian studies, etc. Creative writing students could judge literary contests in the public schools and help publish young writers by creating web-magazines. Public school teachers could tap the research and mentoring skills of university faculty to inspire gifted students engaged in special projects.