Throughout my education I have always enjoyed writing, but I have never been very good at the professional style of writing. Coming into a writing class in college scared me, I won’t lie. I was worried that I would be graded off my grammar and spelling technique, like I have been graded in the past. Going into this Literacy Project, I did not know what to expect. I previously glanced at what the Literacy Project was going to consist of and I freaked myself out. The assignments involved in this project looked overwhelming to me.
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Beginning my process into starting my personal Literacy Project I was asked to view other individual’s personal literacy experiences. This was put in place for student to reference what an actual literacy narrative is. One literacy narrative that I viewed was a video by a Somali immigrant. Yusuf Mohammed moved to America as a young boy from Somalia. He spoke no English when he arrived but he overcame the language barrier and is now a student at Stanford University. His literacy narrative showed me that if he could overcome his language differences then I can do the same. Through viewing this literacy narrative and others like it, I learned that a literacy narrative discusses a person’s literacy challenges or successes to tell their personal story. The critical process that I used to extrapolate information from the narratives in which I viewed was through the use of a chart. The chart helped me visually understand that literacy narratives all have similarities in the way they are formatted. I learned that a literacy narrative is always based on one’s personal experiences.
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![](http://www.weebly.com/weebly/images/file_icons/rtf.png)
literacy_narrative.docx | |
File Size: | 15 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Click link above to view Kailee's Literacy Narrative
Once I knew what a literacy narrative was and how it is written, I was ready to attempt my own. Even though I thought I was ready to attempt my own, I got very nervous when I looked at the assignment requirements. I was required to write a 1000 word essay to complete my literacy narrative. I began brainstorming for my paper that required me to critically reflect back on my childhood education difficulties and successes. I first started my critical process by writing out a list of people, things, and experiences from my childhood that had to do with reading and writing. Then, I wrote up a couple different introductions, to figure out which ideas I wanted to write about. Eventually, I sat down and completed the rest of my narrative that connected with my introduction well. As I wrapped up my narrative, I checked to see if I made the 1000 word requirement which I was stressing about, I stressed over nothing, because I was well within the required word count.
Literacy Group Project
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After composing my own personal literacy narrative, I was placed in a group with four other fellow classmates. We all moved to desk near one another to meet each other. We then decided as a group to exchange literacy narratives with the group member sitting on our left-hand side. This way everyone in the group had a different person’s narrative to view. We each had to incorporate our critical reading and thinking skills in order to comprehend our group members paper. As we read we all pulled out important information from the narratives, such as: Age narrative is based on, main idea and struggle/challenges. This chart was on a shared Google Doc so that everyone’s information in the group was on one page. From the chart we could all see what all of our literacy narratives had in common. Also from the chart of our narratives we came up with a group name, “Challenge to Gratefulness”. We came up with the name because after looking at the chart, all of other narratives spoke on our challenges and how we have overcame them. The similarities between all of our narratives were that we all based our narratives on our elementary school education. Also we all spoke on teachers in our past that helped or harmed our reading/writing abilities. As a team we all discussed what we wanted our literacy webpage’s genre to be. We agreed on creating a webpage that would rate elementary school teachers. The reason we agreed on this specific genre is because each narrative included a teacher involvement.
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Rough Draft Group Webpage
As the group project progressed, I started to feel less nervous. Things were coming together. My group was not able to meet outside of class, so we decided to exchange numbers with each other to communicate. No one in the group was completely competent with the use of Weebly. The member in our group that was the most computer literate was chosen to create a webpage template. Every member in the group was responsible for a grade level on the webpage, based on the grade level teacher that helped or harmed them from their literacy narrative. Also anyone could contribute to the homepage. We, as a group, did not run into an serious conflicts or problems besides the fact that we had only one complete day to submit our webpage rough draft. Also we ran into the problem that Weebly does not allow more than one person to work on the webpage at a time. This limited each contributor's time allotment when working on the webpage. The title of our webpage, Pick or Pass was chosen to mirror Rate your Professor without plagiarizing a well known website. The Pass is for teachers that are not recommended and the Pick is for teachers that are recommended. We also incorporated the fact that the title should be at an elementary school level of thinking.
After every group in my class submitted their webpages, the class was required to view and critique other groups’ webpages. Once the allotted review time was up, our professor held a class discussion. The discussion consisted of each group telling other groups their critiques. Some of the positive critiques we received were that our webpage was very organized, our format was cohesive and our genre was well liked. The only criticism we received was that we needed to explain what our webpage is about and how “picking or passing” on a teacher dealt with literacy. |
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Click on the button to view an intriguing webpage.
Self Reflection
Despite my prior fear of this first writing course project, it proved to be challenging yet achievable. Throughout this project I applied many of the course outcomes to my work. I used critical reflection when I was reflecting back on my past education to get ideas for my literacy narrative. I also used critical reading skills to read and comprehend my group member’s narrative in order to contribute to the group project. In composing this entire literacy project I incorporated multiple different styles of composing processes to produce my best work. I may have used knowledge of conventions and rhetorical knowledge in my composing process for this assignment, but I am not very certain on what these two course outcomes are and how they are portrayed in such an assignment.