Tech Fair, Co-sponsored by the CTLR and LIS @ Middlebury on Thursday, June 4th.

I looked at some of the ways I’ve used technology in four classes:

• WRPR 0202 Writing to Heal (15) (digital media projects)
• FYSE 1144 Jane Austen and Film (15) (digital media projects, on-line discussions before and during the semester, RSS feeds)
• WRPR 1813 Mystique of Pride and Prejudice (20) (off campus experts online with students)
• WRPR 0100 Writing Workshop 1 (digital media projects)

Mack made posters for all of us who presented:

]]> http://blogs.middlebury.edu/slices/2009/06/09/tech-fair/feed/ 0 http://blogs.middlebury.edu/slices/2009/01/31/time/ http://blogs.middlebury.edu/slices/2009/01/31/time/#comments Sat, 31 Jan 2009 18:50:44 +0000 Mary Ellen Bertolini http://blogs.middlebury.edu/slices/?p=69 One of the wonderful things about working at Middlebury College is that every three Januarys, I have a month off from teaching. Don’t get me wrong. I love teaching, and my students bring me great joy, but a bit of time away from the classroom means time for longer projects, time to indulge in a sustained thought.  This January, I’m working on two projects: revision for an article about how I use writing workshops in my Writing to Heal course and preparation for a JASNA-VT talk on Jane Austen’s Persuasion. Certainly, immersing myself in the Peninsular War and the Convention of Cintra have helped me weather the snow, ice, and cold that has descended on northern New England this year.

To protect their privacy, I do not have links to digital stories done by Writing to Heal class, but here are links to digital stories done by some of my other classes.

I blogged about my Writing to Heal class last year when a high school class visited Middlebury. You might be surprised at what happened.

I’ve included some sources that helped me prepare my course:

Anderson, Charles M. and Marian M. MacCurdy (ed). Writing and Healing. Illinois: NCTE,     2000.
Ballenger, Bruce. Beyond Note Cards. New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook, 1999.
Center for Digital Storytelling
DeSalvo, Louise. Writing as a Way of Healing. Beacon Press,     2000.
Pennebaker, James. Opening Up. New York: Guilford Press, 1990.
Rico, Gabriele. Pain and Possibility. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991.

Sometimes I have comments closed here because of spam, but you can reach me at:
mbertoli(at)middlebury(dot)edu.

Session: B.25 on Mar 22, 2007 from 12:15 PM to 1:30 PM Cluster: 109) Creative Writing
Type: Concurrent Session (3 or more presenters) Interest Emphasis: race/ethnicity
Level Emphasis: 4-year

“Writing to Heal,” “Voices Along the Way,” “ The Art of the Personal,” and “Writing Across Differences”—these writing courses at x College challenge students to explore issues of identity by confronting loss, nationality, sexuality, class, gender, spirituality and ethnicity. In this presentation, three faculty members from Middlebury College discuss hybrid writing assignments from courses that combine creative and critical writing with the use of digital media. Discussing and writing about complex issues of identity and loss have transformed the lives of students taking these courses. Teaching these issues has involved personal and professional changes in the lives of the faculty members as well.

Hybrid genres that combine critical with creative writing provide students with theoretical knowledge and background from which to better explore their lives and identities in a thoughtful, informed manner. Digital media projects from weblogs to digital stories that combine words, music, photography and video encourage students to explore issues of their own identity through media often more in tune with 21st century students than conventional linear forms of writing. The music and visual images students choose in these projects often evoke deeper, tighter writing than students have produced before. A combination of formal and informal writing in public and private writing spaces allows students the opportunity to write for self, for others, or for a private few.

The different kinds of disclosure and identity writing in these courses explode the typical boundaries of assignments and genres when memoirs transform into short stories and research papers and projects use theoretical, creative and personal sources as evidence. In the process that unfolds in these classes, students and faculty learn to control and define their own narratives and explore who they have been, who they are becoming, and who they might yet be. Writing and media assignments that encourage students to understand their own identities better can lead students to understand and imagine better the identity of others. These assignments and courses have transformed personal pain into healing and forgiveness and have transformed self-disclosure into both self-acceptance and political mobilization.

Presenter 1 will discuss “Writing and Healing: the Self and Others” based on her teaching “Writing to Heal”—a course that developed from a school-wide tragedy and personal loss. This writing-intensive course examines writing as a catalyst for healing after loss or grief. This writing workshop class focuses on student writing, but also analyzes fiction, drama, poetry and creative nonfiction. Reading James Pennebaker’s Opening Up and Rico’s Pain and Possibility creates a theoretical underpinning for class discussions. Coursework includes formal analytical essays, creative work, hybrid assignments, electronic journals, oral presentations, and the opportunity to do digital media projects.

Presenter 2 will discuss “Developing Writers for Social Change” based upon “ Writing Across Differences”–a course that explores the many choices we face as speakers and writers when communicating across human differences such as race, gender, sexuality, religion and class. Organized by literary genres, and drawing on writers such as Julia Alvarez, bell hooks, Dorothy Allison, Martin Luther King, Beverly Tatum, W.E.B. DuBois, Jamaica Kincaid, Leslie Marmon Silko and others, the class analyzes and produces a range of works that employ diverse methods of argument and inquiry, including personal narrative, online discussion, literary analysis, and research presented in papers, weblogs or digital stories. The course creates personal and public domains for written and digital work. Students respond to one another’s work, creating a writing community that is both supportive and challenging.

Presenter 3 will discuss “Hybrid Language, Hybrid Genres” based on work in two courses. The first, “Voices Along the Way,” an interactive first-year seminar designed for ESL students, introduces contemporary American culture via literature and film and explores the American landscape and mindscape through a sense of place, family relationships, and the American educational scene. Students conclude the course by “creating an identity,” within which they explore their own potential contributions to a global community. In doing so, they write essays, create web pages, and design and deliver multi-media presentations. The second course, “The Art of the Personal: James Baldwin’s Non-Fiction,” looks closely at how one writer, James Baldwin, articulated so eloquently the national, racial, sexual, and religious antagonisms of his lifetime, the class explores the personal essay as a vehicle for, as Baldwin put it, “recreating out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” The class reads Baldwin’s major essays (from Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name, and The Fire Next Time), writes about them, and writes personal essays.

The course work of Presenters 2 and 3 motivated them to establish a cluster of seven Social Justice Course classes at Middlebury College, which collectively brought in speakers to address topics, such as, white privilege political expression through the arts, as well as, collectively organized deliberative dialogue sessions on gender. The Cluster motivated Presenter 2 to change her course name to “Writing for Social Change.”

By discovering, disclosing, representing, and transforming identities though unconventional creative writing assignments and digital media projects, Presenters 1, 2, and 3, have affected positive transformations in their students, their colleagues, themselves, and their Academy.

Mary Ellen Bertolini
(Speaker 1) Middlebury College Writing and Healing: the Self and Others
Catharine Wright
(Speaker 2) Middlebury College Developing Writers for Social Change
Kathy Skubikowski
(Speaker 3) Middlebury College Hybrid Language, Hybrid Genres

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Originally uploaded by mebertolini.

I’ve been thinking lately about why I let three months go by without posting here. One reason is that I was preparing for and have since been teaching a course in Writing to Heal. I keep asking myself how I can write about teaching this course without violating my students’ privacy–as if even my pedagogy in this course should be secret. Ironically, I’m always harping about the benefits of transparency in teaching, but whenever I teach this course, I’m super-conscious of the trust my students place in me and what I owe them in return for that trust. I’ve developed protocols about what information is public and what information remains private in this course. I have a Movable Type blog site were I post changing and very general information. Connected to this site, is Middlebury’s homegrown course management site with pages I can open and close to the public. Any reader on the web can see my course description, syllabus and weekly assignments.
No one but my students and tutors can see our on-line discussion and drafts of my students’ papers. Given all this, perhaps it may seem completely contradictory that I threw the doors of my class open on workshop day to 30 high school students and two of their teachers. I did not plan on opening my very private class in this way, but circumstances often lead us down unimagined paths.

For the past three years, some of my Peer Writing Tutors have had an on-line. tutoring relationship with students from Ticonderoga High School in upper New York State just across the lake from Middlebury. Teachers and students planned a trip to visit Middlebury to meet some of their tutors and other Middlebury College students. Most of the time they could visit in the morning coincided with the time of my Writing to Heal class and the workshop on our second paper. I wondered if a few of my students would mind modeling their workshop for the Ticonderoga students. I brought up the subject tentatively in class and followed up with an e-mail to all the members of the class in which I gave students the opportunity to workshop their papers in a private location if they did not want to workshop their papers in front of the visitors. I hoped that of my sixteen students that, at least, eight might volunteer to read their papers aloud and workshop them for the Ti High students, but all sixteen agreed!
To accommodate our thirty or so visitors, I moved my class to the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research in the Library. My sixteen students formed into four separate workshop groups with six to eight visitors each. As we had done before, my students read their papers aloud and commented on each other’s work by making positive, specific suggestions for improvement. My two class tutors moved between the groups and helped keep the conversations on track. Occasionally, the high school students asked questions or made comments—but mostly they watched and listened as the 18-20 year olds workshopped their papers like pros. My students received a big boost in self-confidence that day, and the high school juniors and seniors caught a glimpse at where they may be headed academically.
One of the reasons I dared to open my very private class to visitors is that they were face-to-face visitors and not on-line visitors. Anything they heard or observed that day was transitory, fleeting while GOOGLE is forever—or seems like forever. More and more, as I continue to use Social Software and web-based tools for my classes, I feel aware of the future lives of my students and the powerful search engines that will track their on-line past for years to come. Thanks to Middlebury’s course management tool, Segue, I can choose what to open and what to close on our class site. Students can read each other’s discussions and papers on-line, but others outside the class cannot. A reader of this blog, for example, can find the paper topic and worksheet used that day, but will not be able to read my students’ papers. The window for that experience opened a crack for a group of high school students, but the hour has lapsed; the opportunity has closed.