Outreach Blog 4

Outreach Blog 4

            My fourth engagement was the same as the ones before it, a four hour session on the twenty-seventh of October from eight in the morning to noon.  The location was again Mrs. Fyke’s classroom at Dexter High School.  The participants were the students in her three freshman English classes and a class of sophomore English students.

            Something I disappointed about with this engagement has been my lack of independence and the restrictions the curriculum imposes.  I forgot that these are freshman and sophomore English students and that many of them are learning the very basics of literary technique and criticism.  In class we’re going over things like anaphoric, personification, alliteration, allusion.  The ABC’s of an English education and the elementary terms necessary to engage in any kind of in-depth discussion.

           

            How can a writer most effectively activate and participate in a social imagination?  First I’d like to set the terms before I approach the question.  By social I’m going to assume that that is the intended audience or the likely audience that the writer will engage.  I’ll assume imagination to mean the creative, or the ways in which people think abstractly or abstractly reality in order to imagine something new or impossible.  I’m still left with a very vague conception of what a “social imagination” might be but I would imagine it to mean the common framework within which people in a society abstract their realities, through language, symbols and stories, etc.  The way I imagine this could be accomplished is to engage people on common ground and then complicate convention.  It’s a powerful feeling when you finish reading something and you feel as though the author has rocked your world but it could be simply planting a seed that will grow in time.