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ERIC Number: ED373343
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 1994-Mar
Pages: 13
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Furthering the Collaborative Collage.
Donovan, Eileen
Writing instructors who would like to move beyond the collaboration provided by workshops and peer-response groups might consider asking groups of students to write a collage together. According to Peter Elbow, a collage "consists not of a single perfectly connected train of explicit thinking or narrative but rather of fragments: arranged how shall we say?--poetically? intuitively? randomly? Without transitions or connectives...the collage invites (readers) to create actively out of their own consciousness." A college instructor asked her students to use the collage form to respond to the fractured, multivoiced narrative of William Faulkner's novel, "As I Lay Dying." If the assignment worked, however, it did so because it was preceded by several in-class creative assignments, in which students wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style. Of the six groups involved in the Faulkner assignment, two groups provided character studies, one group analyzed the phases of the journey, one group took the characters into the future, and another group analyzed characters via imagined psychotherapy sessions. All but one of the finished collages included writing modelled in the style and vernacular of the Faulkner characters. In evaluations, students were very positive about the experience, though there were a few who fell away from their groups. Mixed results suggest that these projects must be closely monitored. (TB)
Publication Type: Opinion Papers; Speeches/Meeting Papers; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A