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About 150 city and suburban high school students converged on campus recently for "Writing Our Lives: Digital Ubuntu–We, Too, are Connecticut," a conference that was the culmination of a yearlong digital writing initiative with six local schools. The Connecticut Writing Project-Fairfield (CWP) organized the successful event through funding from a competitive LRNG Innovation Challenge Grant from the National Writing Project in partnership with the MacArthur Foundation and musician John Legend’s Show Me Campaign.

Throughout the day, young people shared their digital projects – blogs, websites, podcasts and TedX Talks – and heard from Matt De La Peña, author of We Were Here , a young adult novel distributed to all participating schools.

The day was centered on the African philosophy of Ubuntu , according to Dr. Bryan Ripley Crandall, director of CWP, which is housed in Fairfield’s Graduate School of Education and Allied Professions.

“Human beings are human beings because of other human beings. This is Ubuntu,” he said. “The conference was designed to unite hundreds of students from Darien, Staples, Central, Global Studies Magnet, Bassick, and Joel Barlow High Schools. Through reading We Were Here and encouraging students to write for audiences beyond school, students were asked to think about their own humanity and their responsibility to other communities in Connecticut. Through TedX talks, blogs, online mapping, and radio podcasts, student participants used ingenuity to reimagine classroom spaces in Connecticut. In this sense, they challenged Connecticut’s zip-code apartheid in celebration of democracy and a collaboration to address the opportunity gaps in the state.”

For more information about CWP-Fairfield’s LRNG Innovation work .