Fall Semester Highlights: Part I

This semester of teaching was full of many bright spots. Here are just two:

Projects!

Storytelling and Civic Engagement

The final project for my Storytelling class required students to plan a storytelling event (implementation optional). One of my students went above and beyond the call. As a nontraditional student, she has worked for the past 20 years as a “cleaning lady” for several elderly clients. She not only cleans their homes, but she also befriends them, and spends time listening to their stories. For her project, she invited some of her clients to a storytelling workshop. She expected 3 people to show up; she ended up with 16! She gave them simple prompts, and encouraged them to begin to write stories from their lives. They were so enthused, they asked her if she could host a follow-up event. She contacted the local library, and secured the use of their community room. Ten of the original participants showed up, bearing snacks. At their insistence, they met one more time before she had to present her project to the class, which several of them attended (again, with snacks!). Her presentation was lovely, and one of her participants shared the story of how he met his wife. This was civic engagement at its best!

Drunk Book Reviews? Okay...

This one was a bit risky: I mentioned to the students in my YA lit class my fantastic idea of producing a show called “Drunk Picturebooks” (I know—shocking! But the idea came to me when one of my students did a project where she read a book to her roommate without showing her the pictures, and had her draw what she thought was happening. There may have been some drinking involved, ahem, and the results were hilarious. So my mind began to perk…I even came up with a couple taglines to ensure consent: either “I volunteer as tribute!” or “I solemnly swear I am up to no good,” and I even thought of a kid-friendly version where the kids would just be hopped up on sugar.). Anyway, three of my lovely students came to me and asked if they could do Drunk Book Reviews as part of their final project. They are all over 21, so I said “Well, I can’t really stop you…” because, you know, plausible deniability. Anyway, they drank some wine, filmed themselves for two hours, and edited it down to 15 spectacular minutes wherein they very smartly engaged with the portrayals of diversity, identity, mental illness, and gentrification in the novels we read this semester, highlighting theories of dialogism, unreliable narration, and poetic and graphic novel form. They also made memes, vines, and social media pages for characters--I have to admit that they put that wine to very good use.