For this issue of the Newsletter, I’ll invite you to step inside the From the Archives Time Machine to transport back 15 years for the 2009 September Sessions … which at that point wasn’t even called September Sessions yet. We called it “PWR Orientation,” and, much as now, it was a three day extravaganza full of professional development goodness.
In case you’re curious, here are photos of the first pages for daily schedules for the 2009 Orientation. We had a PWR 1 day, a PWR 2 day, and a “Looking Forward” day.
This was at a point when we weren't all "cubed up" on the third floor of Sweet Hall, and we were able to hold all our meetings in the open space in the middle of the floor, which had several round tables, and, occasionally, some portable whiteboards (borrowed, temporarily, from Wallenberg).
Everyone walked away from each PWR Orientation not only feeling ready for the year to come, but also possessing a red binder filled with our most current version of the Instructor’s Guide. Every year, the Assistant Directors (at that point, me and former lecturer/Assistant Director Nancy Buffington) would update the Instructor’s Guide, page by page, integrating edits submitted by the different committees (who helped with updating as part of their contributions to the program); print out those updated pages; and then turn them into a ready-to-go Instructor’s Guide for the upcoming year. In case you were wondering what happened to the great tradition of Instructor's Guides, their legacy lives on digitally: those pages served as the foundation for our current TeachingWriting website, although they’ve been updated quite a lot since then.
For those of you lamenting the passing of the Red Binder Era in PWR, take heart: we’re doing paper folders this year at September Sessions!
coming soon!
