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.

Outreach Blog 3

Outreach Blog 3

My third engagement was the same as the first and second, a four hour session on the twenty-third 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. This outreach has forced me to develop my forethought and planning skills.  My first engagement with the students felt forced and lopsided.  I felt like I was leading them by the nose through the story rather than helping them to discover it for themselves.  I needed to know the story well enough to be able to investigate it on the fly to keep up with the story well enough to be able to investigate it on the fly to keep up with the pace of the class.  I needed to be familiar enough with it to ask prevalent questions.  We read Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado in class.  The story is about a man buries another man alive, seemingly, as revenge for a perceived wrong he’d suffered at his victim’s hands.

            I asked them fairly open ended questions.  “Why did Montresor kill Fortunado?”  They would give an answer and I would ask them to return to the text to support their claim.

            Often the more tangential claims were left open or were later retracted by the students.  There were some notable exceptions though where students made claims about the narrative or characters that weren’t affirmed later in the text but there was no further evidence to refute it.  Their fresh insight gave them an untainted or unbiased reading.  They weren’t looking for any Freudian symbols, weren’t trying to draw Marxist hierarchies or trying to make a convoluted argument denying some form of authorship.  Some of the students highlighted points of tension in the story I had laid to rest.  Other challenged it in way I hadn’t imagined!

Outreach Blog 2

Outreach Blog 2

            My second engagement was the same as the first, a four hour session on the twenty-first 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.

            Reading through my last post I noticed how I didn’t expand on how I was going to give students these tools or how they might apply them.  The “tools” I’ll be referring to are a term I’ll use interchangeably with the mindset I wish to instill in students when they’re engaging something new or on a deeper level and “tools” as in methods and questioning to ask themselves about their writing and others.

            The mindset I want to instill in them is an openness and a willingness to approach someone else’s writing on its own terms.  Acknowledge we can never totally detach ourselves and our perceptions from our reading but to come to a work in the spirit of charity and a willingness to engage the work on its own terms.

            The “tools” in the sense of actual writing means aware of and asking questions about the work.  What mode of narration is the author using?  What does this do for the story or to the story?  What was the author’s intention in this work?  Assuming that was their aim, did they achieve it?

Outreach Blog 1

Outreach Blog #1

My first engagement was on October eighteenth at Dexter High School in Ms. Fyke’s classroom.  She teaches mostly freshman English classes with one sophomore class thrown in the middle of the day.  My time during each unit lasted four hours from eight in the morning until noon.  I made sure each night before I went to school I had a nice pair of clothes ready for the morning.  Assisting in a classroom doesn’t necessarily mean I have to have my Sunday best on but there should be a presentation of composure and professionalism.  The location of my outreach, Dexter High School, is populated by largely middle/upper-middle class white kids so I knew having gone there that I wasn’t reaching out to the disenfranchised and needy urban youth.  But they are a very homogenous community so part of my goal in this engagement was to give them the tools to initiate with something new or on a deeper level.

My experience at Dexter was that many of the teachers that taught me never got me to engage with the material we were learning in that I was never excited to go to class or saw how what we were doing in class might relate to something I’d like to do.  When I thought about the teachers that had made an impact on me I tried to examine what it was they did to capture my interest.  I realized they made the classroom more of a dialogue than a lecture.  They informed about what we needed to know in order to carry on a conversation and that related it in a way that engaged the human element for me.  Why someone was passionate enough to put pen to paper that they felt they had to write this story.  Or what did this moment in history mean to these people even thought it may not affect me in any direct way?  My experience with Dexter is that they were cramming in what they needed to in order to raise test scores.  I wanted to try and engage the students in the same way and to the same degree that I was with teachers I enjoyed.