History for 7-9-13

History for 7-9-13: Its the End of the Literacy World As We Know It.

1. After enjoying a lovely breakfast by Jen and her history from the previous day, we  warmed up our writing minds through an assignment: write an outrageous story about yourself.  It could be fictional.  After writing, we each shared our stories and Kathryn asked whose was based on a true story and whose was fictional. It was split pretty evenly. People took risks and tried new things. Go Summer Institute 2013!!!!!
   
   
2. Kathryn led a demo on character development.  We explored creating a character based upon ourselves, from a fictional perspective. First, we wrote our personal traits that we present to the general public and then wrote the traits that were private.  Afterwards, we shared three of those traits, from either list.Then, we selected one trait from the private list and wrote a seven minute fast write with the goal of showing the element of the private persona.  Afterwards, we read the stories aloud while each member of the class wrote feedback on a post-it note that was then passed to the reader. Taking the feedback from the note, we revised these drafts for fifteen minutes and then shared two sentences.
   
   
3. This brought us to 11:15 am, when we wrote or worked on whatever we wanted for a whole hour.   Thank you Writing Goddesses that planned the day. We also had a reminder that we would be reading our work on Friday at the Blue Frog cafe. A few people panicked, myself included.
   
   
4. LUNCH BREAK- good conversation and some even ventured outside of our den, taking short walk around the block
   
   
5. After lunch, Sarah Hobson led a thought-provoking discussion on the article on Situated Literacy.  For me, it was the end of literacy as I knew it. Sarah asked us to write about what our reactions to the article were, what stood out to us, and what questions did the article raise.  We spent about ten minutes working on this.  Next came the discussion. We paired off and annotated the article, shared the information with Sarah, and she guided us (with a chart) through the important terms and our reactions to the article.  Sarah gave us a question to think about over the next few days- If literacy practice and events are situated in social contexts, how so we make sense of the differences in resources for different communities?  How can we account for the different types of resources? She also  requested that we start coding out Literacy Autobiographies to reflect the different domains in our lives. Some heads hurt after this discussion, especially mine. It was spinning.
   
   
6. 3:15- adjustment of the daily agenda and reassessment of tomorrow’s plan.  We each selected a piece of reading we would present tomorrow and decided that we were on our own for breakfast tomorrow.
   
   
7. 4pm- asked Kathryn about doing these notes.  She mentioned that she tried to write them in ways she had never tried before.  Having spent my class time writing these notes, I didn’t want to scrap them, but am planning on putting a creative spin to my next go around.  

Personal Reflections about our literacy events (I just had to work that in) of the day- I saw so many people take risks, step out of their comfort zone, and really begin to talk about what it is that we do and what we want. Thank you so much ladies for being such excellent models.