We improve our writing skills through the daily practice of responding to our adventures in journals and longer essays. Summer Ink began when two history teachers, Debbie Reck and Arthur Unobskey, noticed that their students, especially those from underserved areas, struggled to explain themselves in their writing. Wanting to help, Debbie and Arthur began grappling with the essential questions of
literacy education:
- How do you teach students to write?
- Which skills are necessary to good writing and in what order?
- How can you tell if students are acquiring those skills? To explore these questions, in 1994, Debbie and Arthur established a summer writing camp, The Writers’ Express. With their first set of 10 campers, they began to pilot methods of teaching writing. The camp functioned as a kind of laboratory where Debbie, Arthur, and their staff could try a range of techniques and monitor the results. They discovered that to improve writing, students required feedback from adults who recognized their insights in a mutually supportive classroom climate. The writing program Debbie and Arthur developed, The Writers’ Express™ (WEX) method incorporates these supports, builds daily on foundational writing habits, and challenges students through extensive sharing with peers to recognize different perspectives on similar experiences. Since its inception, WEX has been adopted and implemented by dozens of schools and hundreds of teachers nationwide. The summer program Debbie and Arthur created, now called Summer Ink, has grown from serving a small group in its first year to a current enrollment of about 130 students. The program moved to Tufts University in 1997 and then to Simmons College in 2004, where it continued to serve middle school students. The high school program, Boston & Beyond, launched in 2006. In 2009, Wireless Generation (later known as Amplify) purchased WEX. The Summer Ink camp broke off into as a separate entity, though it continues to be fully licensed to use WEX. Thanks to Debbie and Arthur and the work they invested in WEX, Summer Ink serves as a national model for how students can learn outside the classroom in an engaging, academically rigorous way.
