Sharing Stories and Experience 4

In my own class, I require that students keep a journal and use them to explore issues of cultural identity based on both their own experience and on class and online discussions. And each week, we begin a class session by sharing journal entries. In this way, students are generating their own narrative writing, often using the personal narrative essays they've read online as inspiration. The online essays model how to consider and write about issues of identity, and how to develop engaging writing based on personal experience.

What links together the entire Sharing Cultures Project experience, I think, is personal narrative, writing, reading, and sharing each other's stories and experience. When I was in South Africa, I learned more about the country and the people in it from listening to the personal stories of our teaching partners. It makes a great deal of sense to me that our students would learn more about each other's cultures by reading narrative writing based on personal experience generated by other students, rather than by reading complex and scholarly essays. And in our experience this year, we find that students are better able to relate to the readings and the experiences described by their peers. Discussions, both in class and online, are much more organic and vibrant, and students are tangentially exposed to the readings they didn't choose as well as the area of focus they didn't choose, and this facilitates students learning from each other.

As I said, this project is a work-in-progress, and we are still progressing, adapting materials and assignments as we go. But this year, I feel better organized and more satisfied that my students are getting plenty of practice in writing and sharing their ideas in written form. And based on the results of an in-class survey, they are responding to the personal narrative readings much in the way that I had imagined. More than anything, they are learning not only about their own uniqueness as they explore personal identity, but they are discovering that they are not so very different from each other or from students in South Africa.