Marquisha Flowers teaches secondary English. She is a National Board Certified Teacher in Adolescence and Young Adulthood/English Language Arts, UCLA Writing Project Fellow, and Teach Plus California Instructional Leadership Fellow. She develops curricular and instructional resources and strategies that include mastery learning and grading, student engagement, and differentiation to bridge rigor gaps and provide students with the tools to be successful. She believes that all students can learn and should have access to rigorous, engaging, authentic, and creative learning experiences that honor their voices. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in English and Sociology from UC Berkeley, Master of Arts in Education from Pepperdine University, and Doctor of Education in Leadership from the University of Southern California.
Sasha Avila studied art history and world literature at UC Irvine, later earning her credential and masters at UCLA. It was here at UCLA where she grew into a social justice educator and anti-racist advocate. She is now an English teacher at California High School where she reads literature with her students and gets to see them instilled with a sense of agency, empathy, cultural awareness, and solidarity. She is forever grateful for her experiences at UCLA as a student and Writing Project Fellow.
Faye Peitzman, teacher-professor at UCLA, started her academic journey at the University of Pennsylvania and earned her doctorate at New York University. She is grateful for the many years she’s directed the UCLA Writing Project, learning from teachers who share just how they go about reaching their students and guiding them to claim the identity of writer. Faye will tell you how she admires birds with wide wing-spans, the ones who fly across oceans, and who always seem to know when to flap their wings and when to soar.
Daniel teaches history in the Humanitas Magnet for Interdisciplinary Studies at U.S. Grant High School. He has taught in the LAUSD since 2003. He’s a National Board Certified Teacher and has worked with the UCLA Writing Project since 2009. Spending a few weeks each summer writing and discussing teaching with a new group of amazing Los Angeles educators is a true highlight of his year. Plus, it gives him time to catch up on all of the writing Daniel should have been doing during the rest of the year.
The Writing Project Invitational gave me a joyful purpose, moments to learn, and many lessons that I can take back to my classroom.”
Refine, elevate, and celebrate how you teach writing. Join other educators in the greater Los Angeles area who put students center stage. The UCLA Writing Project invites you to apply for our Summer Invitational Institute where you’ll be immersed in the teaching of writing. You will demonstrate your own prized practices, learn from a wonderful group of colleagues, and develop your own writing craft. Issues of social justice will be both the backdrop and foreground of our endeavors. We’ll point to the intersection of race and language. We’ll cultivate a space for educational dialogue centered on anti-racism and anti-racist teaching of writing. English, social studies, mathematics, world language teachers, and all teachers of multi-lingual learners—this Project is for all of us!
