Studio Journal Four For our fourth studio journal entry, focused around critical theory, I presented an assignment I was given in high school. After reading Michael Ondaatje’s memoir Running in the Family, students had to write stories about their own families in three different formats: a poem, a prose poem, and a prose narrative. To me, this assignment connected to our course concepts surrounding how to present and teach writing concepts to students with a variety of backgrounds. Within a creative prompt, students are given space to explore their own stories in their own words and language traditions, without as many limitations based on perceived need for formal or Standard Written English that may exist with more academic assignments. Additionally, the requirement of three different formats of creative writing opens space for conversations surrounding different writing styles and techniques, and could be expanded to include discussions of multiple forms of English and the ways students feel these should be used in different spheres. My colleagues agreed that this assignment presented an excellent chance for students to explore their own styles and voices in writing. Judy referenced a similar assignment she’d encountered in which students write a Where I’m From poem, similarly using creative modalities to incorporate their own backgrounds and stories while still challenging themselves as writers. Judy also pointed out that allowing and encouraging students to write personal narratives can humanize written forms like poetry, which sometimes feel unattainable or inaccessible, too ‘high and mighty'. Assignments like these can allow students to take ownership of the art form. Carianne elaborated on how the three different forms of writing provide plenty of outlets for students to discover forms that felt comfortable and relatable for expressing their own experience, and also left room for them to be creative and challenge themselves as writers. If I were to revise this assignment, I think I would incorporate conversations around language explicitly. This could take the form of written student artist statements on their works, where students explain their intentions behind each piece and why they made stylistic choices that they did. This would help the teacher grading the assignments to minimize any personal bias, especially surrounding students’ grammatical characteristics, and open doors for further conversations about choices within written English. This addition to the assignment would also allow students to reflect on their processes, and ideally make them self-aware of stylistic choices within their works. My colleague Judy presented a prompt based around the graphic novel Persepolis. She described an assignment where students would craft a miniature autobiographical graphic novel addressing their own positions of power and privilege, just as the characters do in Persepolis. In addition to having many of the beneficial traits of creative writing that I listed in my assignment above, Judy felt that this assignment would promote self-reflection and self-awareness, which is often deemphasized in high school classrooms. I suggested she consider an addition to the prompt where students also consider the ways in which they might lack privilege to account for the fact that not all students may identify with being ‘on the top’ of society, and allow room for those students to share experiences of oppression as well. This assignment would address aspects of positionality and systems of power that play into critical theory both overtly through this process of self-reflection on privilege and more subtly through the flexibility of the creative devices used as the assignment’s framework. My colleague Carianne shared an assignment in which students would craft an Instagram post, captions, and comments from the perspective of a book character of their choice as a method to study character relationships, desires, and motivations. Carianne felt that choosing a medium such as social media that many students are comfortable with would remove some of the institutional barriers that may bar students from discourse within the world of academia. This could potentially help mediate dissonance between students’ ‘home’ and ‘school’ languages. It would also allow them to engage in the literary process of character analysis on a more familiar and personal level, again providing a feeling of accessibility within the academic sphere. I thought Carianne’s chosen artifact was also an excellent example of multimodal writing instruction, leading into our ensuing unit! Attached below is the assignment I completed in high school on which I based my artifact for this ethnography
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
|