Talking Writing with Dr. Sandra Murphy: A Podcast
Break on through to the Other Side
Sandy Murphy has spent the better part of a half century researching writing instruction, writing assessment, and writing teachers and teaching. She was there on the ground floor of the Bay Area Writing Project in the 1970s and 80s, the model for what is now the National Writing Project, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Her early research focused on finding the most effective writing prompts used by practicing teachers in the classrooms. By effective, Sandy and her colleagues meant prompts that evoked good writing from students. Among the earliest theorists to explore the affordances of portfolio assessment as a means to support student learning to write, she followed her instincts as a teacher and framed assessment not as accountability, but as opportunity to learn.
It was my good fortune to begin my doctoral program at UC Davis when Sandy was in the beginning stages of her work as a professor in Language and Literacy. During my early coursework a few of us wanted to take a course in Vygotsky, which was not in the catalog. Sandy agreed to teach a seminar where a small group of likeminded students read Vygotsky and engaged in intense discussions that became foundational for many of us. She modeled for us the essence of responsive teaching; participating in the seminar with Sandy as a teacher was in perfect harmony with the ideas we were studying.
Sandy served as my major professor on my dissertation committee and guided me toward my own study of portfolios in the writing classroom. She and David Pearson challenged me to do better work than I knew I was capable of and helped me form my own theoretical framework for assessment in the service of teaching and learning. They represent for me the best examples of highly influential educational researchers moving in rarefied spaces who keep their eyes on the prize, i.e., teachers toiling in the vineyards and learning as it unfolds for children and young people in the classroom.
In this talk Sandy and I look at the National Writing Project (NWP), a professional development institution serving public classroom teachers year after year since its beginnings as the Bay Area Writing Project at UC Berkeley. As I began to say earlier, Sandy was working for her doctorate at Berkeley during the birth of the NWP and started a lifelong relationship with the National Writing Project. Sandy along with her longtime colleague Mary Ann Smith have published a book giving voice to writing teachers to be published in November, 2023, a tribute to the NWP. In this podcast we look back and also at her current work as an ambassador for writing classrooms that bring out the best in student writers and their teachers.