Your Literacy Narrative

We'll begin the semester with an informal writing assignment. For this 2-4 page paper (or 3-minute digital story*, podcast*, or movie**), you'll reflect on your own development as a writer. This kind of reflection can help us become more sympathetic to the challenges all writers face, but it may also help us to uncover strategies that might work for those writers or to discover some of our own assumptions about the writing or learning process.

You could choose to narrate a single story from your childhood, from high school, or from college. Or you could choose to tell a series of stories (like a series of snapshots from an old photo album) about your development as a writer. No matter which approach you choose--single or multiple stories--you will need to reflect on what this story means to you as a writer or what it says about the process of learning to write or what it implies about tutoring or about teaching and learning.

Below are some questions that might help you uncover one or more stories to tell for your literacy narrative.

• What are your first memories as a writer?
• What was the first thing you ever wrote for fun or for school or for someone you loved? Do you still have it?
• Where did you learn to write (different places? different times?)
• Who helped you?
• What struggles did you encounter?
• What successes did you have?
• What confused or challenged you as a writer?
• What struggles have you encountered as a college writer?
• When did something really "click" for you as a writer?
• How have you made the transition to writing in your own field?

The goals of this assignment (and thus the evaluation criteria for the assignment as well) are pretty simple. You will:

• write an engaging narrative describing your (real, not fictional) experience(s) as a developing writer (note that developing writers aren't just children: college students learning to write for a new class and college professors learning to write for a new journal are also developing writers).
• use some of stylistic techniques of the narrative form that will make your narrative engaging: using vivid imagery, setting the scene, providing the context and background for your story if necessary, inserting yourself into the text. You may also wish to employ a narrative arc--move quickly into the action of your narrative, develop some mystery or drama, and then conclude with some reflection on the meaning or significance of your story. Ira Glass, from NPR's This American Life, has quick yet informative videos about how to tell a good story. In particular, watch these two videos of his on YouTube: here and here.
• provide an element or moment of analysis or reflection that will tell help your reader/listener/viewer understand the meaning of your story or its significance.
• experience the Writing Center as a tutee. Make an appointment for a tutoring session in the Writing Center and take a draft (at whatever stage in the process you prefer) of your literacy narrative to that tutoring session for some help, ideas, conversation about your work. Then write up a description/analysis of your tutoring session for your Tutoring Journal. Click here to see the instructions for setting up an appointment online.

You may decide to submit the final draft of your literacy narrative to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, but if you decide to submit your narrative to the DALN's national archive, please type OaklandUniversity (no spaces and with the capital O and U) into one of keyword spaces so that your narrative can become a part of OU's Contributing Partner's Page.

The first draft of your Literacy Narrative is due on February 8th for a peer review.

You will present your Literacy Narrative to the class on February 15th.

* I will provide some quick in-class instruction on using MovieMaker to create a digital story and Audacity to create a podcast.
**The Student Technology Center in the basement of the OC can provide you with a digital camera or digital movie camera (free) to film a movie, and they can also assist you with editing that movie.