Seeing & Writing Online Community - Chapter 2: Coming to Terms with Place

SURE-FIRE ASSIGNMENT: You Are Where You Live—Or Are You?

Mon, 17 Oct 2005 08:42:14 -0500

I begin my freshman composition course with a unit on Place. I use place as the prompt for the writing sample I like to get from students during the first week of class. Taking my cue from the introduction to Chapter 2 of Seeing and Writing, I ask students to respond to the saying, “You can take the kid out of Brooklyn, but you can’t take Brooklyn out of the kid.�? Their task is to replace “Brooklyn�? with their own town or city, one they have spent a significant amount of time in or one that had a significant impact on them. Unsurprisingly, some students respond eagerly to the prompt, writing pages upon pages, while others struggle mightily to eek out a page, unable to identify particular characteristics of the place they live or lived in, never mind identify how those characteristics are reflected in them.

Surefire Class: Coming to Terms with Place

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:46:06 -0500

Comparison is a writing technique that virtually every college student recognizes as valuable, and most will use it with some frequency in their writing. Not uncommonly, however, when faced with the host of other issues that accompany the writing process, students fail to sufficiently examine the logic behind their basis of comparison, or set up a comparison so that it yields troublesome either/or arguments.

Surefire Assignment: Haunted Houses

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:44:38 -0500

Of the house by the railroad, Edward Hirsch writes, "The house must have done something horrible / To the people who once lived here." Popular culture offers many examples of haunted houses or places.

Surefire Assignment: Collage in Art, Music, and Poetry

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:43:42 -0500

This class helps students make connections between collage in art, music and literature. Students begin by examining how Kerry James Marshall uses collage to bring together disparate visual elements from history, memory and imagination in “Watts 1963.�? Next, they see how contemporary musicians create “sound collages�? by sampling riffs from old songs. An interactive exercise allows students to create their own poetic collages.

Surefire Assignment: The Building Said It

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:41:32 -0500

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.

Surefire Assignment: Narrative Newsletters

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:40:34 -0500

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.�?

Surefire Class: The Places We See

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:34:08 -0500

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.