Catherine D. Yates
Creative writing, scrapbooking, and weaving them together give us a way to honor our lives, as well as a way to make sense of the spaces we live in. Scrapbooks are a hand-held exhibition of what could help make sense of loss, as well as celebration. This power is felt with the scrapbook, one designed for the studying of objects. Intentional description and storytelling preserve our stories, a process described on the Cabinet Project website.3 The Cabinet Project is an excellent example of how mixing research with storytelling becomes narrative writing. While recreating an electronic Cabinet resource for a local high school requires resources beyond the capacity of most schools, through writing activities, a powerful exhibition serving the same purpose is available to most.
Engaging students in curating an exhibition of personal objects that highlights the stories of student loves, successes, and failures uplifts the community. The practice of writing about objects creates relationships we can learn from between the present and the unknown past. Stories, tales and memories provide important information, not only about the past and its context, but also about people, places, and events linked to the object.
The Cabinet is a community collection model that includes a component where stories, tales, memories and researched information are recorded and linked to objects. The contextual information is often unique and specific to a particular person or family, even when linked to a common object which may be seen in many different contexts. As such, the recording and sharing of the story in textual, visual, or aural form is crucial. The information may be collected as an event where team members talk to contributors and record their information before linking it to an exhibition of their objects.
This project points to how community building and descriptive writing about objects showcase our values. Teaching students to write focused, descriptive narratives grounds their writing. When writing is studied in community, it makes this writing visible to a wider audience. This unit is a hands-on study of how writing about objects, inspired by the model of a scrapbook, teaches students to appreciate their writing skills. The appreciation which comes from positive recognition of their experience encourages them to value themselves. Confidence in our writing gives students confidence in their academic skills. This confidence is what young people need to succeed and to enjoy their lives. Writing for an audience, for an exhibition, gives them this opportunity.
