To share Project 1 drafts, please write a post that includes your draft:

  • You can cut and paste your draft into the post if you’re working somewhere else.
  • Your post is visible to anyone. If you want to make it so only you and I can see it, you can make it private. If you want to make it so that only you and I and our class can see it, you can make it password-protected and then share the password with me so I can share it with the rest of the class. See #7 in these instructions about writing a post to learn more about these different privacy options.
  • Before you publish a post, you need to choose a category. Here are instructions for how to add a category. The category for this post is Project 1 Work.
  • Give this post a title that makes sense. If you want to call it Project 1 Draft, that’s fine, but if you have some thoughts about a title that makes sense for your work, you can use that, too. For example, your title might be Project 1 Draft: Learning to Drive.
  • If you haven’t gotten very far, that’s ok–I still encourage you to share what you have so that I can help you move forward (and your classmates can, too).
  • Keep working–even after you post this, you can keep editing your post, or can even add a new post if your whole draft has changed.
  • If you’re interested in taking advantage of the multimedia features of writing in a post rather than in a Word file, please do! You can add links, embed photos, sound, or video, etc–just make sure it adds to rather than distracts from the required work of the education narrative project.

A member of our class community wrote to ask about getting caught up with coursework on the OpenLab, and I know they are not the only one wondering about this. On the first day of the semester we talked about late work, and I talked about how I don’t penalize late work but that doing your work late could make things harder for you to move forward.

To get all of us understanding what an education narrative is and what each of ours can be, I encourage everyone to catch up on discussions from previous weeks. Basically every discussion I created for us to have on our OpenLab site leads to Project 1 in some way.

I would recommend reading through all 5 of our weekly agendas and looking to see which discussions you haven’t yet participated in. Some of the early ones are good for getting started thinking about yourself in college, about your education, and about education narratives, like Frederick Douglass’s and Malcolm X’s, or even Mike Bunn’s, if we consider that an education narrative.

At the same time, the most recent discussions–those assigned in the Week 5 agenda–are the most directly relevant to getting your draft of Project 1 together.

So I really recommend making a list and prioritizing which to do first, which can wait, which you might skip if you can’t get to them at all (hopefully not, but I’m realistic). This might include starting to work from Week 1 and Week 5 and making your way back through to the middle weeks.

Some of the work of drafting your project *is* the work of the online discussions. So definitely do that work of answering three questions from the assignment instructions (a discussion from Week 5’s agenda), because you need to do that to develop what Anne Lamott (an author whose essay called “Shitty First Drafts” we read in Week 5) would call a shitty first draft.

I’m happy to answer questions and give feedback. If you’re comfortable asking questions publicly, you can reply to this post with questions. If you’re more comfortable keeping things private, email me. I will share out my (anonymized) answers to emailed questions if they’re relevant to the class.

I’m so looking forward to read all of the ideas you’re considering for your education narratives. Taking your work from ideas to drafts to a more finished project is exciting work, and I’m here to help you see your projects take shape.