Tim Dewar Named Director of the South Coast Writing Project

The South Coast Writing Project (SCWriP) at UC Santa Barbara has named Tim Dewar as its new director. Located with the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UCSB, SCWriP is a site of the California Writing Project and of the National Writing Project. SCWriP is committed to the belief that teachers are the key to educational change. It designs systematic and ongoing programs to improve the teaching of writing by involving teachers from all levels of education and all subjects. SCWriP is perhaps best known for its Summer Institute in Composition and Critical Literacy for selected outstanding teachers each summer to develop a cadre of teacher-leaders who conduct school site inservice programs for schools, school districts, and colleges throughout the tri-county region

After receiving his PhD in English education from UC Santa Barbara, Tim Dewar joined the faculty in the Department of Secondary Education at the State University of New York, New Paltz as an Assistant Professor teaching courses in English education and coordinating the undergraduate English education program. He is a specialist in the teaching and assessment of writing, in research on classroom practices, and in the professional development of teachers of English and the language arts. He also served as a co-director of the Hudson Valley Writing Project.

Dewar is a former co-director of the South Coast Writing Project (SCWriP), and a former supervisor of credential candidates in the Teacher Education Program in the Gevirtz School. A fellow and teacher-leader of SCWriP since 1994, he participated in numerous SCWriP advanced institutes, and served for many years as a widely valued presenter and classroom coach, and coordinator for SCWriP inservice programs in schools. He is also a former member of the California Writing Project’s Institute for the Study of Academic Writing and served for two years as coordinator for a major research project sponsored by the National Writing Project to assess the impact of SCWriP inservice programs in schools.

Dewar is a veteran of 13 years of teaching in secondary school classrooms. He has taught in public and independent schools in urban, rural, and suburban settings, grades 7-12. He piloted a heterogeneous ninth grade English course that was later adopted by the department, team-taught an interdisciplinary American studies course for high school juniors, and taught Advanced Placement courses. He has also taught in Nepal and Tanzania.