Later this morning I'll be conducting a writing workshop intended on shifting our thinking from continuity to discontinuity. We'll be working with ideas from Mary Catherine Bateson's "Composing a Life Story" as a way to explore how we want to represent our experiences this semester in Service-Learning.
My hope is that students will accept my challenge: that they look at some of the disparities and conflicts and contradictions in their service experience--in their "lived" lives, not according to the shell of some familiar cultural narrative--say, the academic "I am a good student"--and find a way to invent a form that allows them, encourages them, to embrace that disparity, those conflicts and contradictions.
How does one write about, and represent, experience and thinking that is NOT unified, that is not linear, that does not fit into a neat cohesive scheme?
Given that most academic writing mimics a familiar academic form, the thesis-driven essay, or the unifiied analysis, how does one invent a form that accurately represents their experience?
I want students to write a hybrid of narrative and analysis. I want students to be innovative in their think and their writing.
How can we be innovative as learners?
One way is to consciously stray from the familiar, received form.
Question: How does the received form, the familiar instrument, prevent one from accurately depicting the truth of their experiences and the rich possibilities of their thinking? If you take that challenge, the world of thinking and writing opens up suddenly in new and exciting ways.
One has to be playful, and willing to explore where form can take you.
I hope that there will be some fun and joy in the act of creating. I also hope that there will be some evidence of a compelling making.
What is the truth of your experience?
How do you present that?
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