Building bridges: how writing connects our community

Posted on Jun 02 2009 at 4:15 PM

What can I say about Room 32… twenty-six individuals, twenty-six unique learning styles, twenty-six strengths, twenty-six different backgrounds and home lives, twenty-six distinctive voices, twenty-six personal opinions… twenty-six writers. My challenge for the year has been bringing these individuals together to form a safe, trusting, respectful community of learners. And we are getting there, closer and closer with every day, every laugh, every risk, every piece of writing—piece of ourselves—that we share.  It’s remarkable to watch us learn and grow together, knowing that this is a place we can make mistakes, challenge ourselves, step outside our comfort zone, be imperfect. It hasn’t been an automatic acceptance, but gradually more and more students are opening up and joining in.

To encourage this development and collaboration, I have experimented with combining different minds, different types of learners, classmates who express high and low levels of motivation for writing, peers from different groups who play a different role: the confident jock, the class-clown, the silent student, the “I don’t care. I suck” attitude, the studious one, the show-off, the teacher-pleaser, the emo (who hates to be labeled emo, yet insists on labeling the rest of the school as “jocks and preps”). In Room 32, I invite students to leave these labels at the door—come in and sit with someone new, ask questions of a classmate who you may consider different from you, engage in conversations and group work with someone you don’t know (someone you may think you know, but they will quickly assure you, you don’t know). In Room 32, we all have something in common: our writing. It is our writing that will continue to draw us closer as we explore, discover, and share who we really are and how we all fit together in this class, in this school, in this world. Writing is our bridge, connecting and guiding our lives.

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