The Fall 2011 Digital Is Resource Retreat
Impressed by the work being done through the UNCC WP Urban Sites group, the NWP folks in charge of Digital Is commissioned us to create and publish a set of resources for their website featuring the intersections of technology and our work as critical urban educators. We began this work months ago, reading articles on critical teaching, post-colonial theory, and composing technologies; meeting at Amelies’s to begin organizing our thinking; and taking a weekend retreat to Ellerbe, NC to set about the task of creating these resources.
It didn’t take long after checking in to the Ellerbe Inn to realize that we were all a little uncomfortable. This collective feeling, though, had little to do with with Lil contracting a case of the hebejebes from finding a dead bat in her bathtub, or Alicia pointing out over lunch that property on which were staying “felt a lot like the scene from a horror movie where everyone gets murdered.” No, what we all felt was what writers fear most. Each of us, it seemed, had spent the month since our first meeting trying to figure out just what our resource would be, and while we all had some ideas, none of us seemed to know how these ideas would translate into a resource suitable to be published on a national site like Digital Is.
Our anxieties began to fade as we met over lunch and saw that not only were the directions we were considering perfect for Digital Is resources, but also that each of our paths connected at different points. We discussed how the articles we read shed light on the work we were each doing, and also how the ideas of one article in particular by Steven Fraiberg (2010) changed our thinking about the drafts we were creating, the ways in which they intersected, and how we could show this inter-connectivity of our work within the structure of the Digital Is website.
After finishing our initial conversation over lunch and meeting with our writing partner for the weekend, we set out to begin the task ahead: by Sunday, each of us would have a draft of our resource completed. With pre-retreat jitters long gone, everyone settled into a spot and dug in. Two days of thinking and writing, flocking and ranting, sharing-out and rewriting. By Sunday morning, with a final hour and a half writing sprint, we sat huddled together, coffee cups filled, adding what we could to our drafts.
Some important work took place at the retreat that weekend. Some, like Cindy, Alicia, and Tony, left the weekend with their completed drafts posted on the Digital Is site, awaiting the feedback of other creators. Others, like myself, had a little more thinking and writing to do. But regardless of the condition our drafts were in, we were each heading home with not only a sense of accomplishment over our individual work, but with also an awareness we could not have accomplished what we had alone. The ideas for our resources intersected through the different veins of the critical and digital work we do, but more importantly than that, they were also tied together by the interactions and spaces that we shared over the weekend.
Over these next weeks, we will each draw upon what was created at the Ellerbe Inn, to leave final bits of feedback for one another, polish our drafts, and publish them to the Digital Is site where others can learn from our collective and interconnected experiences. Individually, our practices will be affected indefinitely, as we take back to our classrooms new ideas about writing, teaching, technology, and learning. And as a Writing Project site, will forever regard a dead bat in the Site Director’s bath tub as an omen foretelling an incredible retreat.
References
Fraiberg, Steven. “Composition 2.0: Toward a Multilingual and Multimodal
Framework.” College Composition and Communication. The National
Council of Teachers of English 62:1 (September 2010): 100-126. Print