Writing is a vibrant activity. At institutions of higher education, however, writing is regularly used as an assessment tool. And in this way, writing quite quickly becomes a product to be produced. As a way to think more about the work of writing and the processes of knowledge production, I have begun to collect images of the notes my students and I produce during our meetings.
To honor this work and resist the impulse to discard it after a traditional paper is produced, I have asked students if they want to share these images online. Below is a curation of the writing work that students have invited me join them in. The images resist traditional linear representations of thought, or the standard US academic essay. Most of these unique, colorful, and spatial representation of students’ ideas, create their own symbolic meaning; a map of thought often only the student and I can decipher.
I thank them for letting me share their thoughts, particularly as they take shape in non-traditional forms.
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But what IS a close reading? Here we work to represent the work that goes into close reading. If we are to communicate our ideas about a text to someone else, what pieces of our thoughts can we work to translate into words?
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How Jane Austen’s writing techniques – her exposition of character assessments of each other – present a unique view of the human psyche.
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Should the criminal justice system use DNA-databasing?
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What does Melanie Klein’s theories of the infant teach us about the law?
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How would an anthropologist respond to the film, Moana?
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Working with post-its and white boards to discover the structure of an essay about democratic historiography.