The backbone of the unit will be the singular major paper: a literary fiction narrative. Students will write a story about a very particular experience, and in this experience express something universal, something true about being a human. This is a literary maneuver, but what forces them to engage with identity is the requirement that the story be told in first person perspective from a voice foreign to them. They must, literally, construct an identity and with this identity present and interpret events as they tell a story.
This is asking students to perform a highly sophisticated maneuver. The point, however, is not necessarily the success of the writing as much as it is the forced engagement with identity construction and the problems involved therein. Therefore, to aid in assessment, the narrative will be accompanied with a composition that reflects on the process of creating the story and the writer’s evaluation both of its success in being true to the particular experience and in the authenticity and realism of the crafted narrator. Furthermore, peer feedback will be essential to the writer: they will need an authentic, social environment for this form of composition with a real audience to read their work or else this will simply become a transaction-composition produced for a grade. Feedback from the instructor and fellow writers is essential to creating a space with stakes high enough to warrant true engagement with difficult questions.
Logistically, I question whether to allow for online, google-docs collaboration or the smaller, hard-copy writing conferences. Mass-feedback could be valuable to a writer trying to communicate a clear voice. Furthermore, any questions they have could receive a variety of responses. At the same time, voice is a
very
difficult thing to achieve, especially for a young writer. This is experimental writing for them more than an accomplished piece, so smaller writing conferences could be more valuable because of the intensity of the dialogue and the extended exchange of ideas. Writing conferences of four can focus deeply on feedback more than an online conference of 22. Perhaps there is some way to blend both? I will structure questions and assignments in a very broad way for online feedback, but still require writing conferences for the more thorough interactions between writers.