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South Coast Writing Project

Founded in 1979 as a site of the National Writing Project (NWP) and California Writing Project (CWP), the South Coast Writing Project (SCWriP) is a professional development program in the teaching of writing and critical literacy at every level of education and across all disciplines. It conducts a Summer Institute in Composition and Critical Literacy for selected outstanding teachers each summer to develop a cadre of teacher-leaders who conduct school site inservice programs for schools, school districts, and colleges throughout the tri-county region. SCWriP teacher-leaders also conduct a summer writing camp for children and a summer pre-service institute for UCSB teaching credential candidates. In its philosophy, principles, and model of professional development SCWriP follows the example of the Bay Area Writing Project, founded at UC Berkeley in 1974 by James Gray and Miles Myers and their colleagues in Bay Area schools and colleges.
Core Principles and Objectives
Classroom teachers (and not visiting university specialists) are the most trustworthy and credible authorities on what works in classrooms and that the most effective inservice programs will be those in which successful classroom teachers share their expertise with colleagues through "hands-on" demonstration lessons.	What working teachers of writing know from their classroom experience constitutes valid professional knowledge, but that, as members of a profession, such teachers also need to challenge, validate, and enhance the authority of their experience by familiarizing themselves with recent developments in composition research
All teachers of writing, K-university, belong to a single, interdependent, collegial community with shared professional challenges, which will best be met through collaborative efforts based on mutual professional respect.	Teachers of writing must write: their authority as teachers of writing must be grounded on their own personal experience as writers, persons who know first-hand the struggles and satisfactions of the writer's task.
A successful staff development program requires the ongoing and continually renewed collaboration of teaching colleagues who will continue to share and pool their expertise beyond a few scheduled workshops or even beyond an extended summer institute.