Tue. Jan. 20, 2010

Today was our first foray into Pratt and "Arts of the Contact Zone." I tried to get students situated into the text by the class reading a fair amount of the piece together--each student reading a paragraph. I'm not sure if this worked too well. We had discussion afterward, but it was mostly me asking questions and getting short responses. By the looks on their faces, I don't think they related Pratt's text to their lives. Thursday, we're going to watch Dave Chapelle's "Clarence Bigsby" skit. Last quarter, we watched this skit and the students laughed and relaxed when they watched Chapelle's version of an authoethnography. In regards to the accompanying writing assignment, I'm not making students create a parody (a la Chapelle), or even truly write an autoethnography, just engage the contact zone and think about writing to the representations others have of them.