Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Icebreakers
Looking at Curzan & Damour, Chapter 2 and their suggestions for first day activities, I thought I'd share an icebreaker that I've used in the past. I tend to think that icebreakers are most effective when they are also relevant to the class in some way. Considering that the class involves writing and their essays will involve using the skills of summarizing, paraphrasing and quoting, I try to make the icebreaker activity involve these in some respect. I pair them up, and they interview their classmate, and I tell them to take careful notes. After the interview, I tell them that the notes they took will be considered "source material" for the paragraph that they will write about their classmate. Then I give them five minutes to write the paragraph. Afterward, I tell them to look at the paragraph, isolating where in the paragraph they paraphrased from the interview, summarized from it, or quoted from it. Then they read their paragraphs out loud to introduce their classmates.
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I had a professor who started out a "Writing About Memphis" course by handing us all a sheet of paper with 10 quotations on it from various sources. She asked us to get into small groups and try to determine, of the 10, which quotes came from works of fiction, which from non-fiction, and which from literary non-fiction. This was an educational process to say the least. My group got about half of them right -- the good old 50/50 split. It was a lesson in the constructedness of genre that I've never forgotten. It even got students to ask questions about the nature of "truth" . . . on the first day. I'd like to integrate something like this into my course, but I haven't decided how just yet.
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