Clarity
All quarter I’ve had students do group work and group discussion and today I changed that up. I performed a workshop for them as opposed to having them workshop and then come together. I clarified our Project two and used two student topics to guide how to approach the autoethnography. The work today seemed to clear up some confusion and link writing to life in a practical way. I feel as though I communicated the Project intentions in a clear way and that I actually knew all the rationale in my head. Over the little break students will be revising 2.2 and bring a draft in on Wed. so that we can workshop Wed. and Fri. of next week.

Workshop
For the remainder of the quarter our class will be workshopping Project 2. Today I split the class in half, allowing them to choose the half they wanted to be on, and had one side look for places in the text where Said communicates his project while the other rewrote a student’s introduction. After working in their groups, I brought the class back together. We worked through the first sentence of one student’s project and drew from the group who explored Said. It didn’t seem like we accomplished very much, yet many students seemed to see the benefit after class. This was a workshop I couldn’t really prepare for. However, it turned out well and I feel like I have a good set up for ho

Presentations
Today students gave presentations to the class on a term from Said. It was great because each student spoke and really dissected and focused on one term. All of the terms connected as students told the class what they knew/learned and as they connected it back to significance and project. I really like this idea of presentations because they can be an informal way of having the class be responsible for the work. I think I will use this next quarter. Since I plan on having students venture out into a contact zone, I was thinking that they could individually present on that at the beginning of the quarter and then at the end of the quarter do something like what we did today.

Visualize yourself on a beach...
Today I had students continue group work on Said’s terms. Friday they will be asked to present the terms to the class and lead the discussion on their term. I think this will be a nice way of extending the shared work of conversation in the class. For the second half of our class today Greg came and did his pre-cognitive exercise, as I like to call it. It was awesome! Each person, including me, was asked to visualize her/himself on a beach. Let me tell you, Greg’s direction and questions really helped spark some interesting ideas for me. A few of my students benefited as well. It was a nice brain break and something to change up the sound of my voice in the class. Thank you

Tired efforts...
We did a Bibliography workshop today. One student brought her handbook. So, I pretty much just showed them how to do complicated citations. I also pointed them to some online sources. It seemed to be beneficial because they all were clearer on the importance of citation and how important it is for Project 2. After that I assigned terms from Said to discuss Wednesday. I’ll be honest, I’m tired. The end of the quarter is weighing on me. I am finding it difficult to maintain momentum. I am doing the work but it feels pretty minimal.