In this project, you’ll write about an experience of your own with a form of your own learning development—IN THE LAST SEMESTER!—one of your many literacies. Think especially of writing and rhetorical experience (reading, writing, speaking, etc.,), though there may be some room for other literacies, too. You’ll take as a focus a way in which this experience helped you understand or develop a facet of your self or your identity. In the course of the essay, you’ll look to show in your writing how this experience changed you or developed your understanding of your self and your life, of how you view your self (or your written literacy) in a different manner before and after this experience, perhaps how your previous understandings of this learning and literacy may have differed from a later development in its progression. This project invites you to make some sense of yourself as a learner, writer, and literate thinker, but also as a changing self. You’ll write to make sense of a significant learning-related event(s) in your life and to consider how it might connect with how you use your literacy or literacies today, and how you see yourself as a participating member of a larger society.
As our readings will show, there are many ways to approach a learning memoir. A few suggestions might include:
- Considering a single, important event which changed your understanding of yourself through a form of your literacy, language use, or writing, or other literacy/skill
- Following a chronological pattern or series of discoveries about yourself
- Discussing significant people in your life related to your learning, writing, or literacy history
- Examining ways in which your particular learning, writing, and/or literacy form has changed—from home to college, from youth to adulthood, socially vs. professionally, etc.