Week 4: beginning
My goodness I have not experienced the technical hurdles we have had in starting this semester before. I am frustrated that our semester has begun this way. We will right that part of this ship this week.
Moving on. First I would like to start by letting you all know that your communal story was a wonderful story. I incredibly enjoyed your vulnerability in offering it. And as we got further and further into it, you all allowed yourselves to be more vulnerable. There is a method in that madness. It was by no means just some silly little activity I asked you all to do. If you watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ted talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” you heard her talk about the importance of our own voices and our communal voices. She talked about the importance of her own voice. She talked about the importance of not adjusting her voice and her writing identity to those normalizing British and American writers. But, to write her own story, and not just a single story.
I offered you Adichie’s talk and the communal story activity for 2 very important reasons. First, I want you all to understand that although we will learn academic techniques of writing argumentation, I do hope that you maintain your own voice in your writing. I am in no way hoping that you lose your writing identity (and YES we all have one of those). My hope is that you try to maintain your writerly voice. Don’t be afraid to use it. It is yours. Second, The communal activity, if you wrote without revising, should have given you a glimpse into a very important brainstorming technique: stream-of-consciousness. This is a brainstorming technique that allows you to write without stopping your thinking. Stream-of-consciousness allows your mind and ideas to flow onto paper without your censor getting in the way. This is a technique that has been overwhelmingly successful in my own writing. I will introduce you to other techniques throughout this first half of the semester. My warning: do not skip the brainstorming part of writing. Your writing will suffer.
You have been asked to write your own story using 1 theme (as exemplified in Cleary’s “A Deeper Well of Memory” and in Terkel’s “Community in Action.” If you have not yet completed your DJP #2, do so by Wednesday at midnight, and I will grade it with full credit. (The prompt for DJP #2 is in the Digital Journal module on our Blackboard as is the rubric I will use to grade your DJP #2 posts.) If you have not yet been able to get your tumblr blog rolling (it seems that almost all of you have gotten this part together), you must email me. And we will figure out how to fix this problem together.
Your prompt for DJP #3 will load onto this tumblr feed at noon today (Tuesday). It will be due by Thursday at midnight. Pay attention to the 3 guidelines and you will receive full credit for your journal post. These journal posts are designed to allow you creative options in your thinking pieces. If you prefer video or audiocasting, prepare those and publish them on your blog as your submissions. As long as the post (whether audio, video or text) fulfills the 3 guidelines required in the prompt, you are free to use whichever format you would like. Tumblr allows you quite a bit of freedom. Test it out.