Proposal

Writing is an important skill for students to hone and develop in ELA Class. Often in middle school students are reluctant writers. They are overwhelmed by the idea of filling out lines and lines of loose-leaf paper. With the focus of education in the United States turning towards the Common Core, more rigorous standards are being set for writing. Students are expected to produce quality and quantity in their writing. Many of these prompts they are given in school and on these Common Core assessments lack relevance in their lives.

I propose for my project creating a series of lesson plans, which I will use in my writing class, that bring relevance to writing for my students.  I would like to create an “Alphabiography “ project, where my students can reflect on events in their lives that have impacted them. By writing about their own experiences the writing will be relevant, cathartic, and boost their self-efficacy when it comes to writing. They will be asked to reflect on the themes of loss, rejection, friendship, family, self-concept, and success. My theme throughout the year in Reading Class and Writing Class is perception, through the lens of race, class, and gender, and my students will be asked to specifically write about these three themes. I think this will be an extremely beneficial project for most of my students. Growing up in a poor urban community, they have dealt with a lot of pain and hardship even at the age of 13, and this could prove quite therapeutic.

I have begun researching different articles to help me make this project a success. They will be working on it over the span of 4 weeks and I would like to create a meaningful writing experience for them. Below is the research I have found beneficial thus far. I will continue to explore more avenues and read more about scriptotherapy.

Annotate Bibliography (Thus Far)

 Dyer, Daniel. “When Kids Are Free to Write.” The English Journal 65.5 (May, 1976):34-41. Web.

Dyer argues that teachers don’t always assign writing by sense, rather they choose the topics by how they sound. To examine the way students approach writing, Dyer conducted an experiment where he allowed his students to write whatever they wanted on Fridays. They could write anything from a journal entry to a fictional story, the choice was theirs. Dyer found that most of his students consistently chose to focus on Life Writing, particularly the female students. The majority of female students used life writing as a way of confronting reality. They wrote letters to Dyer and journal entries, which allowed them to open up. Their writing became a way to express their concerns about what they were going through. Life Writing in Dyer’s class gave students autonomy over their work. I would like my “Alphabiography” project to have the same effect on my students. I would like them to try to write down events that have caused them concern, and reflect on them. In the same way, I want them to be able to reflect on joyous events as well.

Ellen, Kathy. “History in the Making: Writing for Real Audiences.” English Journal 79.7 (1990): 72-89. Web.

Ellen’s article focuses on creating writing assignments that are purposeful and intended for a “real” audience. The idea of a real audience is an audience that benefits from the students writing. She touches upon various formats for writing such as letters, school-wide anthologies, interviews, and diary entries. The segment that is most beneficial to my “Alphabiography” project is one that focuses on familial writing. Ellen argues that writing about events that took place with family members helps students to find value in their writing. When students are able to look back on a familial event they begin to preserve value into their event, by recounting the story they are preserving a memory and strengthening the value and the bonds of family. This article inspired me to incorporate the theme of family into the assignment

Karpiak, Irene. “Writing Our Life: Adult Learning and Teaching through Autobiography.” Canadian Journal of University Continuing  

           Education 26.1 (Spring, 2000): 31-50. Web.

Karpiak’s article focuses on autobiography as a way to inform authors of the importance of the events in their life and the lessons learned from these events. She explains that the act of the writer recollecting on an impacting event and writing about it allows them to see things from a new perspective. It helps them to digest what has happened in their lives and what is currently going on in their lives. Writers create a “self-portrait” of themselves, which they view and analyze. Her argument supports my theory that students writing a form of autobiography will function as a vehicle for helping them make sense of what is going on in their lives, at a difficult point in middle school. Karpiak views the writing of autobiography as experiential and of value. She argues that autobiography asks you to draw meaning from events in your life, which poses as beneficial for students.

King, Laura A. “The Health Benefits of Writing about Life Goals.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27.7 (2001): 798-807.

King discusses in her article that writing has three major benefits, catharsis, insight, and self-regulation. She argues that writing about specific events in a person’s life helps them to gain insight into their emotions or reactions during the event, and then think about how their own mental state. Writing can offer an emotional release, where one recalls a certain event, comes to terms with it, and releases all negative emotions through the process of writing. She continues to explain that writing can even help a person to self-regulate their emotions and their attitude. While King’s main focus is the writing of goals, her theories of catharsis, insight, and self-regulation I find inspirational for how I want my students to view this project. I think it is important to share these theories behind writing and it’s benefits with the students prior to the project.

Klassen, Rob. “Writing in Early Adolescence: A Review of the Role of Self-Efficacy Beliefs.” Educational Psychology Review 14.2 (2002) 173-203. Web.

Klassen argues that life writing is important to help build confidence in the child, being that a lack of confidence can inhibit writing abilities. Children may have the ability to write well and articulate themselves, but a lack of confidence can hold them back and provide them with a dislike of writing. Students build self-efficacy through writing about life events, they are motivated, and they feel that they can be successful. He discusses Bruning and Horn’s theory on creating valued writing projects. They need to nurture practical beliefs about writing, create engagement through writing that is authentic, provide a supportive context, and create an positive emotional environment for writing. An “Alphabiography” project can fulfill all these criteria, and promote writing that is authentic.

 Project Inspiration! 

I came across this digitized text, originally published in 1908, during our class conversation on Wollstonecraft.  My curiosity was definitely piqued…we know Wollstonecraft and Imlay had a very tumultuous relationship–the love letters, as love letters tend to be, might be more on the flowery side but can also provide insight…

http://openlibrary.org/books/OL13563403M/The_love_letters_of_Mary_Wollstonecraft_to_Gilbert_Imlay

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie

Literary scholar Elizabeth Bohls’s book Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716-1818 offers a feminist reworking of eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse by examining the innovative contributions of British women writers.[1] This critical study adds important context to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark not just in deconstructing her overtly political use of aesthetics, but also by locating her work within various literary-historical traditions, such as women’s writing, feminist thought, Enlightenment philosophy, and travel narrative. Other writers that Bohls considers in this tradition include Dorothy Wordsworth, Ann Radcliffe, and, interestingly, Wollstonecraft’s second daughter and author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley.

Bohls’s organizing theme provides significant background for interpreting Wollstonecraft’s letters: the role of women writers in changing the traditional contours of modern aesthetic theory. While the aesthetic is a tricky concept to delimit, she opts for the following definition: “Aesthetic discourse deals with the categories and concepts of art, beauty, sublimity, taste, and judgment, and more broadly from the pleasure experienced from sensuous surfaces or spectacles.”[2] Bohls describes how eighteenth-century women, who were barred from academic institutions, remained in a peripheral position to the male-dominated aesthetic culture. While society women were expected to cultivate “amateur” artistic talents to increase their marriageability, their primary role in the arts was “as aesthetic objects, rather than aesthetic subjects.”[3]  However, some British women writers rejected such marginalization by taking up the aesthetics style via the writing forms available to them—the novel and travel writing. Bohls points to three assumptions these writers dislodged in modern aesthetics: the notion of judgment as universal, a presumed distance between subject and object, and the severing of art from its political and social dimensions. [4]

In her chapter titled “Mary Wollstonecraft’s anti-aesthetics,” Bohls examines Wollstonecraft’s use of aesthetics in Letters as an extension of her political agenda. She writes, “The alternative aesthetics that emerges from these writings would situate aesthetic pleasure in a practical, material matrix extending the body and its sensations to political engagement.”[5] Tracing this development in a close reading, Bohls notes that Wollstonecraft unsettles traditional aesthetic standards, like distance from an object, by linking the aesthetic with “the material conditions of everyday life,” empathetic engagement, and as a device to link her various thematic components. [6] Her aesthetic representation of land and landscape, in particular, are especially revealing because land at this time was a site of political contestation due to the enclosure movement.”[7] Bohls writes, “Rather than justify the social hierarchy and privilege, Letters challenges these by representing land according to the perceptions, feelings, and needs of those who live on it, people who did not match the conventional qualifications of the aesthetic subject.”[8] Bohls, in situating Wollstonecraft against conventional aesthetic, reveals the letters to be deeply related to her previous, more political work.

Bohls writes that while aesthetics was a standard element in travel accounts, Letters may also have been conceived by Wollstonecraft as “a means of achieving economic independence from Imlay.” This adds another dimension to the text in that it may account for her decision to use the travel genre, which was vastly popular and had greater profit potential than her explicitly political writing.[9] Historical details as such are yet another means to interpret the letters and to further situate her political concerns. Wollstonecraft’s life and work has received an abundance of scholarly attention considering such topics as her philosophical contributions, role in feminist thinking, and numerous critical biographies, including our reading for next week, William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of Woman.

If you are having difficulty finding an edition of Wollstonecraft’s Letters, you can find a full-text version through Google Books.
Some of the 18th century books on google books have something called the “long s”–which means that the letter s sometimes looks a lot like an “f.”

Don’t worry; you will get used to that!

Here is more information about the “long s”:

http://typefoundry.blogspot.com/2008/01/long-s.html

If people have discussion questions for the class, can you please post them in advance of the class session?

Much appreciated.  Also–can people post the discussion questions they generated for previous class sessions if they are not up already?

Tomorrow we are going to finish talking about Marable’s book and the Spike Lee film.
But we are going to start the class by speaking for about 20 minutes about a chapter in Semenza’s book _Graduate Studies for the 21st Century,” which is available as an e-book through our library (you do not have to buy it).  The chapter is called “The Seminar Paper.”  Do not take his remarks about needing to produce a publishable seminar paper too much to heart…focus instead on what he says about the research process, which is very useful.

from colorlines.com

Hey folks,

I’ve found some reviews (the first ones that came up in a search) of Marable’s biography of Malcolm X. Below I’m including both the links and some highlights (both interesting and gut-wrenching) from the articles, in case you don’t have time to sift through them.

See you in class!

Negative review of Malcolm X bio is rejected: “ ‘Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention’ is an abomination,” wrote reviewer Karl Evanzz. “It is a cavalcade of innuendo and logical fallacy, and is largely reinvented from previous works on the subject.”

Peeling Away Multiple Masks: Interesting phrasing here: because all biographies do, really, make an argument, even though we often claim they don’t… “Mr. Marable argues that Malcolm X was a gifted performer, adept at presenting himself to black audiences “as the embodiment of the two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister.””

Malcolm X by Manning Marable – review: “One of the great shibboleths of American thought puts Martin Luther King and Malcolm X as reconciling opposites: Martin v Malcolm, the integrationist apostle of non-violence versus the separatist demagogue, coming to a dialectical synthesis near the end of their lives. Marable evokes this dualism while implicitly rejecting it.”

The Malcolm X you don’t know: Manning Marable’s new book is stirring up old controversies: “Any high-quality work that comes out of the world of ethnic studies, or is focused on ethnic concerns, is more often than not a condemnation of the entire field. The problem is not the interest itself, but the tendency to tilt more toward indoctrination than education, self-pitying myth rather than the facts and nuances of human life, which are never as simple as a placard.”

Manning Marable’s ‘Reinvention’ Of Malcolm X: “Marable also explores the question of Malcolm X’s homosexual relationship with a white businessman. “It can be read as salacious or titillating to make this claim,” Harris-Perry said. But Marable “doesn’t necessarily say that Malcolm is a gay man. He is suggesting that Malcolm at certain points in his life engages in sexual activity with men and particularly this man — but he frames it around economic need and social anxiety.””

And for more fun, a tribute to Manning Marable from one of my favorite websites, Colorlines.com.

Good Afternoon Everyone! I hope you all are enjoying your wonderful weekend! I found this interesting study on Marable’s Book “A Life of Reinvention: Malcolm X” conducted by John Andrew Marrow PhD from the University of Virginia using a database at the library. He discusses the false claims that were placed on Malcolm X involving his sexuality, promiscuity, and lifestyle. Enjoy!!

Morrows Critical Review Manning

If you can’t get the essay through the link, go to GC library page –> Databases –> Literature Resource Center –> A Life of Reinvention Malcolm X

Marrow, A. (2012). The second assassination of Malcolm X: A critical review of manning marable’s biography. Journal of Pan African Studies, 5(1), 207-227

You can also find other book reviews and critical essays on this database as well!

Happy Explorations!