Joel Beatty WRIT 540: Teaching Presentation
Context:
Throughout this class many of my peers and I have asked the question: “How can we get more out of the readings we bring into the class to help us enhance writing?”
This simple whole group activity is an attempt to enhance the understanding of one of the supplemental readings that I brought to class for the Life Place Essay, Leslie Marmom Silko’s “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective.”
Using the opening poem from Silko’s novel Ceremony, I will try to demonstrate some of the main points she makes in “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective” and model them through the medium of a creative drama exercise, in the hopes of making a stronger text to reader connection with the participants of the exercise.
Context:
Throughout this class many of my peers and I have asked the question: “How can we get more out of the readings we bring into the class to help us enhance writing?”
This simple whole group activity is an attempt to enhance the understanding of one of the supplemental readings that I brought to class for the Life Place Essay, Leslie Marmom Silko’s “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective.”
Using the opening poem from Silko’s novel Ceremony, I will try to demonstrate some of the main points she makes in “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective” and model them through the medium of a creative drama exercise, in the hopes of making a stronger text to reader connection with the participants of the exercise.
Main Points From: Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo [New Mexico])
“Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective”
Link to Full Version: http://www.unm.edu/~joglesby/Silko%20Essay.pdf
* Pueblo Indian storytelling resembles a spider's web with many threads radiating from the center, crisscrossing one another. The listener must trust that meaning will be made.
*She tells Laguna Pueblo creation story: Thought Woman (Tse'itsi'nako) by thinking of her sisters and together with her sisters, thought of everything that is. In this way, the world was created.
*For Pueblo and other Native people, language is story.
*Words have stories attached to them. So narrative is story within story, the idea that one story is only the beginning of many stories and the sense that stories never truly end.
*Storytelling always includes the audience, the listeners; the storyteller's role is to draw the story out of the listeners. The storytelling continues from generation to generation.
*We know who we are because of our Creation story in this place.
One moves from one's identity as a tribal person into clan identity (Antelope, Badger), and then as a member of an extended family.
*Family accounts include positive and negative stories. It is important to keep track of all these stories: by knowing the stories that originate in other families, one is able to deal with terrible sorts of things that might happen within one's own family. If others have endured, so can we.
Stories bring us together; they keep family and clan together. You learn not to isolate yourself when bad things happen: one does not recover by oneself.
*Pueblo people have never been removed from their land. Our stories cannot be separated from their geographical locations, from actual physical places on the land. There is a story connected with every place, every object in the landscape.
*Language has a boundless capacity through storytelling to bring us together, despite great distances between cultures, despite great distances in time.
Taken from University Of Idaho Lecture Series: http://www.class.uidaho.edu/engl484jj/Lectures.htm
Web Building Activity:
To be preformed after the first reading of “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective”
Materials: Ball of String and Copy of intro poem from “Ceremony”
1. Form the Class into a standing circle with open space between students.
2. Read the 1st and 2nd stanza of the opening poem From Ceremony
3. Instructor will ask the question “What kind of communities do you belong to?” and pass ball of string to the person across the circle in order to answer. As each person in the circle answers they pass the string to another person in the circle holding on to a piece of the string as they toss the main portion.
4. Question two. After everyone has answered the first question the instructor asks another question. “What kinds of occasions do you tell stories?” Again each member hold on to a piece of the string as they toss the ball across the circle. By this time the “web” should be starting to form.
5. Question three. “What kinds of stories could you tell as a teacher?” Repeat.
6. After several passes the circle should have a fully formed web. As a group ask them to set the web on the floor.
7. The instructor reads the next two stanzas of the Intro poem to Ceremony.
8. Thank the circle for sharing themselves and creating a community of shared knowledge. Ask them to “Please keep these connections to each other in mind as we read write and tell stories.”
* Pueblo Indian storytelling resembles a spider's web with many threads radiating from the center, crisscrossing one another. The listener must trust that meaning will be made.
*She tells Laguna Pueblo creation story: Thought Woman (Tse'itsi'nako) by thinking of her sisters and together with her sisters, thought of everything that is. In this way, the world was created.
*For Pueblo and other Native people, language is story.
*Words have stories attached to them. So narrative is story within story, the idea that one story is only the beginning of many stories and the sense that stories never truly end.
*Storytelling always includes the audience, the listeners; the storyteller's role is to draw the story out of the listeners. The storytelling continues from generation to generation.
*We know who we are because of our Creation story in this place.
One moves from one's identity as a tribal person into clan identity (Antelope, Badger), and then as a member of an extended family.
*Family accounts include positive and negative stories. It is important to keep track of all these stories: by knowing the stories that originate in other families, one is able to deal with terrible sorts of things that might happen within one's own family. If others have endured, so can we.
Stories bring us together; they keep family and clan together. You learn not to isolate yourself when bad things happen: one does not recover by oneself.
*Pueblo people have never been removed from their land. Our stories cannot be separated from their geographical locations, from actual physical places on the land. There is a story connected with every place, every object in the landscape.
*Language has a boundless capacity through storytelling to bring us together, despite great distances between cultures, despite great distances in time.
Taken from University Of Idaho Lecture Series: http://www.class.uidaho.edu/engl484jj/Lectures.htm
From Ceremony
1. Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman,
is sitting in her room
and whatever she thinks about
appears.
2. She thought of her sisters,
Nau’ts’ity’i and I’tcts’ity’i,
and together they created the Universe
this world
and the four worlds below.
3. Thought-Woman, the spider,
named things and
as she named them
they appeared
4. She is sitting in her room
thinking of a story now .
I’m telling you the story
she is thinking.
Sunrise.
Ceremony
by Leslie Marmon Silko (1977)
Web Building Activity:
To be preformed after the first reading of “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective”
Materials: Ball of String and Copy of intro poem from “Ceremony”
1. Form the Class into a standing circle with open space between students.
2. Read the 1st and 2nd stanza of the opening poem From Ceremony
3. Instructor will ask the question “What kind of communities do you belong to?” and pass ball of string to the person across the circle in order to answer. As each person in the circle answers they pass the string to another person in the circle holding on to a piece of the string as they toss the main portion.
4. Question two. After everyone has answered the first question the instructor asks another question. “What kinds of occasions do you tell stories?” Again each member hold on to a piece of the string as they toss the ball across the circle. By this time the “web” should be starting to form.
5. Question three. “What kinds of stories could you tell as a teacher?” Repeat.
6. After several passes the circle should have a fully formed web. As a group ask them to set the web on the floor.
7. The instructor reads the next two stanzas of the Intro poem to Ceremony.
8. Thank the circle for sharing themselves and creating a community of shared knowledge. Ask them to “Please keep these connections to each other in mind as we read write and tell stories.”
Hi Joel,
ReplyDeleteJust from reading this handout, I'm excited to see your presentation tomorrow! It looks like a very interesting activity.