For a journal writing assignment of at least 250 words, I ask students to write a first-person narrative adopting the persona of the building pictured. Since the pictures cover a 25-year span, and most of my students are only about five years shy of having spent that much time on this planet, they have a starting point for their identification.

One of the classes that I teach early on in the semester that is closely linked with the reading and visuals in Seeing and Writing comes within a unit in which students are developing narrative newsletters. The students have read narratives and viewed visual compositions in two chapters of Seeing and Writing, “Coming to Terms with Place� and “Capturing Memorable Moments�. They have studied the content and narrative structures of these readings and produced drafts of their own narratives (2 places and 2 moments). This class comes in the middle of the unit and begins to focus the students on the skills of focus, detail, and reflection. In this particular class, students confront “stories� of homelessness through both the photographs in the text and a song by Nanci Griffith entitled “Down n’ Outer.�

At the end of our second unit, the students have discussed the notion of “place� in light of Sanders, Guterson, the movie American Beauty, and several images from our text. They have encountered ideas about suburbia (walls, sameness, security, etc.), home, freedom vs. isolation, being “rooted� in ideas vs. being “rooted� in a place, food as it pertains to place, and point-of-view, among others. We’ve talked about our “place� in life, in relationships, in image and perceptions. We’ve thrown around the notion of authentic “places� vs. inauthentic “places� (think Kevin Spacey in American Beauty). The list could certainly go on.

I first conceived of this assignment as a way to get students to truly see the details and inter-connections of the details in everyday surroundings. I wanted to encourage students to examine closely things they normally took for granted or, worse, did not notice at all. By doing so, I hoped students would think about their places in the world (universe, community, physical location, etc.) and see the integral part that they play in the world, as well as the influences and forces that help mold them into the people they are—their bundles of nerves, beliefs, understandings, ideas, emotions, etc.