The 12th Grade Honors English class at Kern Valley High School in Lake Isabella, CA, participated in its first "Dickens Day of Writing" on February 7, the author's birthday. Teacher Ray Crosby, a longtime Dickens Universe participant, worked with the Dickens Project and UCSC to host the event at this small mountain school in the Sequoia National Forest, about an hour east of Bakersfield. Lake Isabella became the 5th site this year to host the event, joining Santa Cruz, Atlanta, Cleveland, and San Mateo. KVHS is a public school serving a low-income, rural community, and many of the two dozen participating writers are hoping to become the first members of their families to attend college. This was the first academic event like this that most of them had ever experienced, and they embraced it wholeheartedly.
The event itself was a writing practicum where students read the Dickens essay "Gone Astray" as a group, listened to a guest lecture, wrote their own response essays, workshopped those essays with college professor mentors, and submitted their revised work to the Dickens Project for publication. But Kern Valley turned it into more than just a writing event, inviting the Moderate/Severe Special Education class to join in the afternoon festivities, after the heavy lifting of the writing had wrapped up. Students partnered across classes for paired story time, reading children's Dickens adaptations together. For the grand finale, and the entire group learned a Victorian ballroom dance, the Sir Roger de Coverley, and danced up a storm. It was a day none of them will forget, and hopefully the first in a long line of "Dickens Days of Writing" for this special community.
