It’s somewhat reassuring to know that Tucson TAWL has been around long enough that the founding members can no longer remember exactly when the group got started. Randall Smith recalls joining with a group of Ken and Yetta Goodman’s students and area teachers in the early 1970s.  Randall was a new teacher at the time, just beginning to form ideas about the meaning of professional development and the role of literacy in curriculum and instruction. He describes his encounter as “being in the right place at the right time.” Over the years, his association with Tucson TAWL “had a powerful effect on [his] teaching” and led to his current involvement in professional development through IRA, NCTE, and Reading Apprenticeship. It seems from most of the recollections gathered that this initial group did not yet firmly establish TAWL’s presence in the Tucson community. Sarah Costello and Deb Jacobson recall evening meetings in about 1979 or 1980 at Miles Exploratory Learning Center in the Tucson Unified School District. Sarah remembers that, at the time, she and her colleagues felt alienated, disenfranchised and overwhelmed. We were told what to teach, when to teach it, and how to determine if it had been taught. At the same time we were excited, enthusiastic and full of possibility as we learned about research that was being conducted all over the world related to reading, writing, and thinking.

    The group of students, teachers, and teacher educators met in classrooms to talk informally about their teaching and support each other. This group of teacher-learners developed a Kidwatching Guide, which was finally published as a monograph in 1984. Some of the authors, graduate students in Ken and Yetta’s Program in Language and Literacy at the University of Arizona, have long ago moved on. Others, however (Bob and Jackie Wortman, Deb Jacobson, and Wendy [Hood] Goodman), are still TAWL members.

    In the Tucson community, TAWL is best known for its annual conferences and workshops. The first conference was held in 1980, when about 80 educators came to hear Dorothy Watson as the keynote speaker. A fall conference has been held every year since, with conferences in the early 1990s reaching registrations as high as 2,000 participants. Over the years, many well known whole language educators and authors—such as Frank Smith, Jerry Harste, Lucy Calkins, Georgia Heard, Sonia Nieto, Kathy Collins, Chryse Hutchins, Steve Moline, Donna Santman, Isoke Nia, Kathy Short, John Poeten, David Booth, Donald Graves, Jim Trelease, and Shelley Harwayne—have helped us learn from conference keynote speakers. We have also enjoyed hosting many children’s authors at our conference, including Robert Munsch, Mem Fox, Eve Merriam, Vicki Cobb, Bill Harley, Joe Hayes, Michael Lecapa, Susan Lowell, Rudolfo Anaya, and Byrd Baylor. (Please forgive us if we’ve forgotten anyone.)

    Beginning in the late 1990s, attendance began to drop, corresponding to whole language’s “fall from favor” in California. Through alliances with other organizations and local school district administrators, who supported teachers’ professional development by subsidizing their conference participation, we were able to maintain conference attendance at around 500 for several years. Most recently, under the pressures of federal and state mandates and the financial constraints they bring, our conferences have drawn about 200 educators from across the community. We have tapped local expertise, including Ken and Yetta Goodman and Bob Wortman, and have even held conferences with no keynote speakers at all. Of course, through all these years, and in addition to all these wonderful speakers, it has been the hundreds and hundreds of breakout sessions led by local educators of all levels that seem to bring people back year after year while attracting new members as well.