Wednesday, August 1, 2007

Robbins

Robbins, Sarah. "'Writing Suburbia' in Pictures and Print." Writing Our Communities: Local Learning and Public Culture. Ed. Dave Winter and Sarah Robbins. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2005. 88-92.

Robbins presents a lesson plan for teaching her first-year writing students to create photo-essays using PowerPoint. Her approach is documentary, an attempt to engage "material and visual culture" (89) in a writing-about-place pedagogy. The project is interpretive and analytical but also key for Robbins is that students engage in the production of texts, as opposed to staying in the consumption range. That is, they're reading their cities but also writing them. Her assumption is that "proactive citizens recover, critique, and create community texts that reflect the dynamic values of local and larger communities" (89).

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