Prompts for Further Writing and Thinking, Alice Lesnick

Writing to Read
As you re-read Cohen’s poem, make two lists – one of elements (things, ideas, experiences, terms) in it that break or are broken, and one of elements in it that don’t break, that continue. Don’t try too hard to get it right – just see where the lists go.

Do some process writing about what you notice about each list and how the two are alike and different.

Choose one element from each list. Write a focused freewriting in which you discuss how these two elements help make Cohen’s poem about learning. How do people learn, according to this poem? What is an education?

Prompts for Collaborative Learning
What does a game of Solitaire have to do with the education of a young Jew?
How do people breathe in this poem?
Who is the “we” in the last stanza?

Process Writing

Prompts for Further Writing and Thinking, Alice Lesnick

Writing to Read

Think on paper using each of the following questions to prompt a focus freewriting.  Remember, these take about 7 minutes, and the only rule is that you keep writing the entire time, even if you aren’t sure where you are going.  As J.R.R.

(photo: Anne Dalke)

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As Ursula Le Guin says in The Dispossessed, we are "Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity" and "there [are] as many emotions [here] as there [are] people." If you are interested in submitting a piece to the project, please visit this page for more information.

Community

Alice Lesnick -- As a teacher and writer, I am interested in collaboration and change.  I serve as director of the Bryn Mawr/Haverford Education Program at Bryn Mawr College.  I am exploring what it means to begin with the idea that, in Bharath Vallabha's terms, "every individual is at the cutting edge of the universe."

Elizabeth Catanese is a visual artist, poet and teacher who is working to live honestly and authentically and connect with the creative energy of others.

INSTITUTE FOR WRITING AND THINKING, BARD COLLEGE

In designing many of the prompts I wrote, I (Alice Lesnick) have drawn on the philosophy and practices of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. Our approach refuses easy divisions between personal and public meanings, academic and experiential knowledg.  At base, the Institute’s approach to writing to learn is based on the premise articulated by Paul Connolly (the Institute’s Director between 1982 and 1998) that to think is to make language choices. Learning to think is nourished by ongoing opportunities to write informally and in community.  Inquiry is playful.  Writing is revising.

 Thus, the prompts I have crafted to follow each text are deliberately odd-angled, disarming, and playful.  They are supposed to be surprising and to yield surprising ways forward.

The prompts following each selection are presented in six categories: Writing to Read; Prompts for Collaborative Learning; Process Writing; Writing Back; Writing More; and Breaking Media. The purposes of each of this are as follows:

In designing some of the workbook prompts, I have drawn deeply on the philosophy and practices of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College. As a Faculty Associate of the Institute since 1993, I have had the opportunity to learn via immersion an approach to learning that prizes the promise of intellectual community and recognizes intellectual significance in a much broader range of human experiences and expressions that is typical.  In other words, the approach we take, and offer the students and teachers with whom we work, refuses easy divisions between personal and public meanings and between academic, experimental, and probative ways of knowing and representing knowledge.

To what extent does a hole indicate a break?

What are some holes in your life?

Write a poem which begins with a description of a hole.

How does scale effect perception?

What is the difference between whole and hole?

Make a list of all the times that a mirror has broken in your life.

What were the circumstances surrounding those breaks?

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