Good morning. We’ll start off with a quick review of what we covered Wednesday. The activities from that class, as always, are on our Goals and Plans Doc. Last Wednesday:

• we looked at the shout-outs in the reply box to last Monday’s post (and reviewed the difference between abstract and concrete language);
• we shared some (concrete) cultural artifacts and described their (abstract) significance to us (and we also introduced the idea of a narrator’s position; cultural artifacts can help us remember and orient the reader to “where we’re coming from”)
• finally, we did an exploratory freewrite, positioning ourselves (as readers) in relation to the concrete objects (books) we’ll be “reading alone and with others” over the rest of the semester. Some notes from those freewrites:
  • a number of us, including Taisjuan and Angel, liked how reading with others helped “piece together” the meaning of the text (Taisjuan) allowing for conversations about what was “inspiring” (Angel)
  • others, like Elijah and Janelle, liked the flexibility reading alone offers for people to apply their own techniques, like visualizing (Janelle) and reading at various paces (Elijah)
  • many of us, including Nayely and Leslie, mentioned the importance of finding the work interesting and ‘relatable’. Sometimes that had to do with content (Nayely’s “Leap of Faith” for example) and other times that had to do with form (“voice” and “motive” in the example Leslie brought up, A Long Way Gone.

Today in class, we’ll look at the opening pages (79-87) of a peer-reviewed scholarly article. There were some embedded questions in Hypothes.is that I asked you to look at, and these questions will shape our conversations today.

“These analytic conversations can shape and reshape adolescent identities as they learn to trust and affirm their own voices, take risks to act in new and positive ways, and analyze the texts and their own and others’ perspectives.”

(Polleck & Epstein 79)

This was a popular line for response, based on the annotations you made for homework. So let’s use this as a jumping off point. What is the author saying here? Which of these three elements (trusting your voice, taking risks, and analyzing perspectives) resonate most for you with your past experiences? Has one of these skills been hard for you to do when reading in school, but more possible when reading outside of school? In your experience, what other activities besides reading that “can shape and reshape adolescent identities”?

We’ll start class with some freewriting in response to those questions. Take your writing where it goes — that’s what freewriting is for. We’ll share in pairs and I’ll ask you to post a line or two in the reply box in the last few minutes of class.