Kennita Ballard’s Local and National Partnerships
Kennita Ballard is in full command of her class of 6th grade boys at Olmsted Academy North, an all-boys middle school in Jefferson County. During her first two years teaching through Teach Kentucky, Kennita has been active in her school community and is being honored as the University of Louisville’s Alternative Certification MAT Student of the Year.
As if that wasn’t enough, Kennita has been pushing the envelope, helping to develop cross-curricular programming to implement writing across all content areas at her school. In order to do this, she’s signed up for some innovative and prestigious professional development.
Over the next year, Kennita will be part of a program at the University of Louisville called the Louisville Writing Project (LWP). Olmsted North is a seed school for the program, so Kennita has been working informally with the group, but has been selected for this fellowship, which runs professional development sessions throughout the summer and into the next school year.
According to their website, “Since LWP began, approximately 775 teachers have come to the University of Louisville to hone their skills as writing instructors in the LWP Summer Institute and to learn to be literacy leaders through their continued affiliation with the LWP Network.” We are so delighted that Kennita has been selected to join these elite ranks!
To continue her work helping to develop cross-curricular literacy and aide students in finding their voices in writing, Kennita is also participating in the National Endowment for the Humanities Gullah Voices workshop. She is the youngest participant who has been selected for this summer’s workshop.
This innovative workshop includes “sessions [that] will examine the artistic expressions of the Gullah, direct descendants of slaves who worked the rice plantations on the coastal islands off the shores of South Carolina and Georgia. Their history, stories, beliefs, and creative expressions are critical antecedents to African-American culture and the broader American mosaic, as we know it today. The workshop format will follow the African tradition, where the arts are studied as interrelated living experiences rather than as separate entities. Participants will be guided through the process of thinking about and using the arts to teach the humanities.”
Kennita is excited to bring back the experiences she has in this workshop to her school and hopes to use them to help her implement cross-curricular standards into her teaching next year. Her classroom culture places an enormous emphasis on community, and she hopes the Gullah Voices workshop will help her to teach her students about the concepts of togetherness and community in Gullah culture.
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