This two-part professional development workshop is led by WITS writers, Corinne Manning and Putsata Reang. The intention for this training is to offer practical content and strategies that are suitable for all students and to encourage open discussion about how to meaningfully incorporate multiple, engaging, storytelling techniques in diverse learning settings.
Manning will lead the first section, which will focus on gamifying creative writing. When we tell stories we make sense of the world and we also limit the world — the stories that can help us understand this most are found in games, and this is often the greatest literacy with our students. Participants will explore methods to bring game design and gamification into creative writing.
Reang will lead the second section, which will focus on calling forth the tangible and intangible things we carry with us and escorting them onto the page. We all carry something, tangible things like that locket from a loved one or the basketball in our backpack, and intangible things like courage in our spine and regret in our minds. Reang will guide participants through the techniques of applying personal narrative writing about the things we carry as both a social-relational and civid imperative, to help create a classroom culture of cohesion and belonging.
This 1.5 hour workshop will fulfill OSPI’s Continuing Education clock hours (1.5) for all state educators and meets the requirements for ongoing Racial Equity Training for teacher certification.
Register to attend online at the link above; no advance registration is required to attend in-person. This workshop is free to attend.
Corinne Manning is a prose writer and literary organizer whose debut story collection We Had No Rules is forthcoming from Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020. Corinne has been a writer in residence for WITS since 2011. Their essays and stories have been published widely, and most recently anthologized in Toward an Ethics of Activism and Shadow Map: An anthology of Survivors of Sexual Assault. Once upon a time, they founded the James Franco Review, a literary intervention project that addressed implicit bias in the publishing industry.
Putsata Reang is a journalist and author of the debut memoir, “Ma and Me” (FSG/MCD May 2022), that explores debt, duty and the reckoning of her gay identity with being a Cambodian refugee. “Ma and Me” won the 2023 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and was a finalist for a 2023 Lambda Literary Award, a Washington State Book Award and a Dayton Literary Peace Price, as well as being shortlisted for the 2024 William Saroyan International Prize. Putsata’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Politico, Ms magazine, and the Seattle-Times, among other publications, and has been anthologized in essay collections highlighting LGBTQ+ and Khmer voices. She is an alum of residencies at Hedgebrook, Mineral School and Kimmel Harding Nelson, as well as the Jack Straw Writers Program. She has lived and worked in more than a dozen countries including Cambodia, Afghanistan and Thailand.