When I name the heroes in my profession — the figures who have had the most positive influence on the teaching of English in the United StateS during my career — James Gray is at the head of the list. There is no doubt about that. The National Writing Project was Gray’s brainchild, and his alter ego. The NWP has been, in my opinion, the most influential and the most effective agency for professional change in the past fifty years or so.

The only other names ranking anywhere near Gray on such a list would be James Moffett (redefinition of English and English teaching), Louise Rosenblatt (reader-response criticism), and Nancie Atwell (middle-school English). More controversial but certainly influential would be James R. Squire (NCTE support of research and curriculum reform), Ken and Yetta Goodman (whole language approach in elementary school), and E. D. Hirsch (cultural literacy). Rounding out a top ten might be the Donald Murray/Donald Graves alliance (emphasis on writing processes), G. Robert Carlsen and other Dora V. Smith descendants (promotion of adolescent literature), and Charlotte K. Brooks (English for alienated students, especially inner city minorities), or perhaps the Arthur Applebee/Judith Langer partnership (research in English Education).

I have been speculating on such a list for about twenty years now (without significant change, by the way), but when I began, Gray was the only representative on the list whose influence was not represented by a written text. I was delighted, therefore, to welcome the appearance of Teachers at the Center: A Memoir of the Early Years of the National Writing Project (NWP, c2000). It not only documents the development of the project but also provides a canonical statement of the project’s principles and core practices (especially in Chapter Six, a detailed account of a “year in the life of a writing project”).

But Teachers at the Center is delightfully personal — as one would expect a text from Gray and the NWP to be. The first three chapters, especially, tell stories. In them we learn who Jim Gray was and why he became the teacher/leader he did. From Miss Popham’s special class in the eleventh grade, on through university days at U of Wisconsin (in the McCarthy era), work as a truant officer and social worker, that first “shaky” teaching experience with seventh graders (don’t we all related to that?), and his halcyon days as a teacher in San Leandro, California. Jim’s is a candid account. “Teachers establish their credibility by admitting their mistakes.”

Having admired Gray so long as a teacher and advocate of writing, I was a little bit surprised, and absolutely elated, to discover his fresh approach to reading. In a little section called, “The Classroom as Library,” he tells of lining one wall of his CCC portable at San Leandro with apple crates filled with books. He spent Saturdays shopping at used book stores and the Salvation Army, gathering appealing titles at $1 a bag. “I became more and more convinced that the best thing I could do for the general mix of high school students was to cultivate their love for books. I believed then, as I still do, that if students become readers at an early age, they will be readers for life.” How often that has been discovered and documented — from Lou LaBrant’s “free reading” in the Eight-Year Study of the 1930s to Daniel Fader’s Hooked on Books (q.v.) to Bob Carlsen’s “guided individual reading.” And how seldom has it been implemented in English classrooms.

Early on, Gray discovered that conventional methods of teaching and classroom materials were not for him:

“I became disgusted with literature texts with their three poems-per-poet approach and with their questions at the end of each work, which seldom ventured beyond just the facts . . . . The grammar composition texts were worse. To me, they were wrong-headed and unfriendly books that taught students to recognize an indirect object but did not teach students to write.”

So, for him, it was back to Miss Popham’s free reading of fiction with Fridays devoted to letting students talk with one another about the books they were reading. The effect was magical, so his course was set. A highlight of this book for me was his story of one first day of class. He had not had time to uncrate the books in a new, experimental classroom. So he commissioned his tenth graders to do it for him, unpacking the books, sorting them by type, shelving them, and placing 3x5 check-out cards in each one. By the time the task had been completed, all of the students had selected books for themselves and, without one word of instruction, had settled themselves down into reading.

Of course, the prime value of Teachers at the Center is its historic account of NWP and the teaching of writing and its insights into composing and teaching processes. But more moving than that, more captivating to me, is the picture I get of Jim Gray, the classroom teacher getting his students to read.

Jim’s account of the initial years of the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP), its earning national attention and eventually becoming the lead project for a California network, and then a national network, is a success story to rival Horatio Alger’s. Jim’s recognition of others involved in that effort, especially practicing classroom teacher, is generous — and characteristic of the man. His brief narrative of efforts to achieve, and maintain, Congressional funding is especially instructive. But what has to stand out in any consideration of the National Writing Project will always be its two cornerstones: writing teachers writing, and teachers teaching teachers. That is the heart of the project; that is its core message to the education profession.

One man’s vision, one man’s dream: one triumph in teacher education and curriculum reform.