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.