A summer writing program for teachers lasts only a few weeks, but it is an important event, sometimes a turning point in a teacher's career. In Composing a Culture, Sunstein "reads" one program for teachers and writes portraits of three high school teachers who attend: Therese Deni, Joyce Choate, and Dorothy Spofford. Between these chapters, Sunstein also creates interests--shorter landscapes of other participants and events.
Often, teachers label a summer experience as "transformation." Drawing from anthropology, folklore, composition theory, educational philosophy, psychology, and women's studies, Sunstein details the informal conversations, events, and personal stories in which the seeds of their changes take root.
As a longtime teacher herself, Sunstein looks into a familiar place and sees an unfamiliar irony: the teacher as student, away from her institution in time and space, participating in an event deliberately designed to be different from school. She turns away from the classroom in order to understand it better. She documents what it is to be a teacher.
In Composing a Culture, teachers "read" their experience, write for themselves, and plan for their students in a culture quite different from school. And as they do it, they re-think the culture of school.
About the Author: Bonnie Sunstein is professor of English and education at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa where she serves as Director of Undergraduate Writing in English and Program Chair in English Education. She teaches courses in research, non-fiction writing, American folklore, and English education. She has over thirty years of teaching secondary and college English in New England, where she continues to teach in the summers, at the University of New Hampshire and Northeastern University's Martha's Vineyard Institute on Writing and Teaching. A practical and engaging consultant, keynote speaker, and workshop leader, Bonnie works frequently with departments of education, universities, local school systems, and conferences of teachers. Her workshops on writing, literacy, portfolios, teacher-research, and cultural studies offer hands-on experience. Bonnie's books for Heinemann include What Works, Composing a Culture, Portfolio Portraits, The Portfolio Standard, and she has contributed many chapters in other collections about writing and research. Her articles, poems, and chapters appear regularly in professional journals and collections. She is co-author of three editions of FieldWorking: Reading and Writing Research (Bedford St.Martins). Bonnie has received Iowa's Collegiate Teaching Award and the English Department's John Gerber Award for excellence in teaching, as well as a Woodrow Wilson Foundation "Imagining America" grant for her FieldWorking Online project. She has led two national portfolio projects, served on NCTE's CEE executive committee, Standing Committee on Research, and was a Trustee of the Research Foundation.
