UNIT ONE: EDUCATION NARRATIVE (PERSONAL NARRATIVE)
In this unit, you’ll have a chance to discuss your educational journey and goals, in whatever way you want to define “education.” We’ll look at the genre of Education Narratives to learn:
1) what it means to be a genre
2) how people craft them, and
3) what our own narrative can reveal to us and to others.
PROMPT
Write about a significant event or events that had an impact on the way you view education, learning, language, identity, and/or school. Think about the examples we’ve read in class: they talk about specific events in-depth, using concrete, significant detail– and they discuss why those events were/are important– not just to the writer, but to the reader.
What can your educational experiences tell your audience about, for example, how language works? About the ways we learn? About the educational system in New York? About class, race, religion, identity? You want your reader to come out of your narrative having learned something or thinking about things in a new or slightly different way.
Suggestions
You may want to write about:
-
-
- an event in your educational career that was particularly formative;
- a specific literacy/ learning event that led you to become the thinker you are today;
- the first time you had a profound experience related to language or learning
-
Remember, how you define education/learning is up to you, but you will want to think about an event that, in some way, had a significant affect on you, and reflects the cultural, social, political, or economic realities of life in New York, the U.S., and perhaps even abroad.
Whatever the context/Event you Decide On, You must:
-
- Talk about how the event shaped your relationship to school, institutions, or education in general;
- Talk about how your particular experience relates to some of the bigger social and cultural issues we discussed in class, such as race, the education system, Standard Written English (SWE), etc.;
- Reflect upon how your experience has enabled you to understand something specific about reading, writing, learning, language, and/or identity, in addition to how that understanding relates to the communities/world you inhabit.
What will you be graded on?
-
- Your ability to develop an overall point/significance for your narrative.
- Concrete, significant detail (are you painting us a picture?)
- Focused event (did you focus on one event or connected, series of events?)
- Language: Have you incorporated sentence structure and vocabulary that allow you to express the complexity of your ideas in a clear, effective style? This style does not have to be Standard Written English (SWE)
- The carefulness of your proofreading and organization You should be able to explain the choices you made.
- Word count: At least 1000 words!
