[With this week’s
final papers and exams comes the end of another semester at Fitchburg State
University, and with it a series of semester recap posts, this time focused on
inspiring student work and ideas! Please share your own semester reflections in
comments, and/or your spring plans and goals leading up to a predictive weekend
post!]
In my fall
preview series (which feels like it was about two weeks ago, but hey), I
wrote about my plans to bring more digital and multimedia options to
Writing I. Here are three examples of how my first-year students responded to
these expanded possibilities:
1)
A number of students chose to create tumblr pages for the personal narrative
portion of the first paper (which includes both a personal narrative and an
analysis of that primary text). In part, I was struck by how similar many of both
the formal choices and the identity themes were in these digital personal
narratives as in the more traditional written ones, reminding me that these
forms aren’t as different as we might think. But at the same time, there were
some striking distinctions, including the way in which tumblr relies heavily on
using images and texts created by others, making these personal narratives much
more multi-vocal than the largely first-person versions created in the written
texts. Made for a richly multi-layered reading and grading experience, that’s
for sure!
2)
Speaking of multivocal, one student (a
Communications/Media major) took that multimedia option for Paper 1 in a very
different direction, creating a podcast conversation between him and a couple
of close friends over some shared interests (especially anime) that had
significantly informed his identity and perspective. This was a much trickier
text to analyze, as it involved virtually none of the kinds of formal planning
and choices that become key focal points for most of the student analyses of
their personal narratives. But that challenge—the question of how to treat a
podcast with the same analytical nuance we’d bring to more formal or
constructed texts—is itself a valuable 21st century question, and
the student found some great ways to consider elements such as structure and
tone within his podcast.
3)
My Writing I final paper, in which students
combine more personal and more analytical/academic styles of writing a la Richard
Rodriguez’s “The Achievement of Desire” and Adrienne Rich’s “When We
Dead Awaken,” has always been a site of impressively original and
innovative student work. That was certainly the case this time around as well,
and one student found a way to link this assignment to the semester-long push
for digital options: she created a hypertext version of the paper, where links
in the academic section went to scholarly resources for her ideas, and those in
the personal section to blog posts, photos, and other reflections of her
perspective and experiences. It was a wonderful Paper 5, and a great reflection
of what the digital and multimedia modes can bring to a first-year writing
course.
Next recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other reflections or predictions you’d share?
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