Dawson College
This week I read a bunch of articles for inspiration. Here’s what stuck out most:This quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery stood out to me as perhaps the most inspiring thing I read all week:“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”I’m thinking a hell of a lot about positivity in my life right now. Specifically, the power of positive thinking. The ability of our beliefs to completely shape our reality. I used to be a pretty negative person, but through a lot of personal work that I won’t get into here, I changed that. And the effect on all areas of my life is profound. I’m really inspired to teach these kinds of lessons to my students. Lessons about attitudes and feelings about your work, and how that can make all the difference in what you can accomplish. It can be tough—it frequently goes into flakey territory, but I’m all right with flakiness. But I see this in the assignments that I’ve done that I’ve really worked (which have all be more creative assignments)—students are excited by the process of working on them. They are focused on the joy of creation, and so the positive result, as far as I’m concerned, has already been achieved. And, the products of this joyous work is almost always something that has energy, original thought, and resonates with its own joyousness. So, I’m really interested in getting students to feel good about the process of creating. For my money, that’s what creativity really is. Like being a kid again. Which leads me to one of the most interesting things that came up in a few of the readings this week. The social aspect of genres. From Sullivan, pages 10-11:“Citizens of the world need creativity to form a vision of where they want to go and to cope with [he lists many things that I’m not going to copy]” From Bazerman: “Genres are not just forms. Genres are forms of life, ways of being. They are frames for social action. They are environments for learning. They are locations within which meaning is constructed. Genres shape the thoughts we form and the communications by which we interact. Genres are the familiar places we go to create intelligible communicative action with each other and the guideposts we use to explore the unfamiliar.”“Moreover, genre is a tool to getting at the resources the students bring with them, the genres they carry from their educations and their experiences in society and it is a tool for framing challenges that reach beyond what they know into new domains that are as yet for them unexplored, but not so different from what they know as to be unintelligible.”Never really thought of genres as frames for social action, not in those words. But this idea is super interesting. We are social beings, and the genres that we write in are how we interact with each other, move each other, change each other. I suppose this can tie into the idea of joyousness I talked about above. Our most joyous moments come from being with other people. Writing then, though lonely, is a way to be with other people. When I write someone a nice message, I’m happy because I know it will make them happy. So, notions of “how did you feel when you were writing this,” or “how do you want your reader to feel when they read this” become very important. And that stimulates a high level of creative thinking, I think, as well as a necessity to consider rhetorical modes, tone, style, etc. Interesting. So, presenting writing as “this is how you interact with the world around you” is a very provocative idea. This can hopefully stimulate that level of excitement for writing that can inspire students to produce their best, most creative work. I think it’s also useful to collect a bank of alternative genre forms and ideas. Concrete examples of these kinds of assignments.I re-read the Bean chapter on formal assignments, which was helpful. I liked the way he phrased the Task aspect of RAFT as a disciplinary problem. This led me to think about what disciplinary problems are there about literature? I don’t find this answer, super obvious, but some germs of ideas that came to me:You’re a teacher, and you have to decide whether you will teach a certain work or not. Or, you have to decide between two works. Writing things down helps you figure things out. You’re writing a journal entry to yourself, weighing the pros and cons of a specific work…You’re a bookstore, and you have to decide whether to display a certain book in your window….You’re a publisher who has to market a book. Make an ad…You’re the writer, trying to sell your book….Bean lists a bunch of ideas in his chapter: exploratory essays, reflection papers, personal narratives, myths, dialogues, letters, poems or short stories, magazine style articles, advertisements, satires, parodies.I like the idea of short creative pieces before or after a more standard style essay. Sue was saying that she does this in our last meeting. It’s important to have models for genres. But something like a personal reflection could work without a model. One other thing that was interesting me in the readings I did last week was the idea of multimodality. This came up in Sullivan. This came up in Yancy’s article, as well as Sullivan’s. Transferring work from one genre to another is a really interesting idea. ................
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