Dear FoodWorks Fellows and Other Friends,
As our summer’s adventure speeds to a close, I would like to share a few reflections about it with you–especially in regard to how the blog has worked and about our goals for the final videoconference.
It’s truly been a pleasure for me to be associated with such an ambitious and timely initiative as Middlebury FoodWorks. The quality and range of the internships, the creativity folks have brought to their engagements with them as well as with the course, and the level of collaboration among the excellent staff supporting this program have provided a rich context for our multi-site, hybrid course. It was a pleasure for me, too, to spend time with each of you at this summer’s three locales. Our individual conversations were essential complements to the central, unifying dialogue of our class: the blog.
I’ve now finished reading back over the entire blog, and want to share a few observations with you. One is that the overall quality improved dramatically over the first several weeks and then remained at that high level. Fellows generally did an excellent job of focusing on a noteworthy aspect of each week’s readings, responding to it in ways that often drew on personal experiences as well. As I’ve shared with you before, I believe that blogs are like conversations, in being exploratory and open-ended. They allow us to glimpse connections and implications that only become clear in the course of writing. The responses to each others’ posts toward the end of a given week, though usually quite a bit briefer, have served the valuable function of inviting you to scroll around in colleagues’ explorations and let them intertwine with your own.
I hope that you will find a way to keep going with this form of writing-for-discovery, whether in a blog, in a journal, or simply within the process of writing a particular essay. You can also view both your further readings and your conversations with colleagues in other settings as prompts for exploratory entries. In the future, when a more formal writing-project seems to founder, with a collision or a gap between important ideas within it, consider making that problem the starting point for an informal response. In my experience, such challenges can be places where your writing needs to go deeper. You all know my email address. Please feel free to contact me, even after our course is over, if you would like to be in dialogue about a writing issue or to send me a draft of some project for comments.
One piece of house-keeping: please check back over your own posts for the whole course at this point and make sure they were all correctly categorized and will thus show up in the final record. As we’ve found, that’s a technical requirement of WordPress that’s pretty easy to forget.
Our final videoconference will be from 9 0’clock until 11 on Friday, July 31st. I’m really looking forward to this opportunity to think about the past two months together. Each of our three teams will have submitted its revised digital story to Mack Pauly by 3 o’clock on Thursday the 30th, so that he can have them ready to show on the 31st. We’ll then watch and discuss the stories one at a time. (I’ll be in touch with Ariel, Mae, and Heather in order to see if your groups have strong preferences about what order we should go in.) Could each team please discuss among yourselves how you would like to introduce your digital story to the whole group? You could designate two or three folks to lead off in this way for a few minutes, then show the story itself. Afterwards, Fellows at other sites will make comments and ask questions, and this would be a good time for members of your team who didn’t participate in the introduction to make sure your voice is heard about the project too. People have invested a great deal of creativity in these digital stories. It should be lots of fun to look at them together.
After we’ve finished discussing all three stories we will have an opportunity for looking back over the course as a whole together. Here are some of the questions that might be especially interesting to pursue. How were your internships related to our readings? Did they reinforce each other? Tug your perspectives in different directions? Which posts on the blogs (either your own or others’) stick in your mind? Similarly, which Fifth Day experiences linger most vividly for you? Finally, how do you foresee this FoodWorks summer relating to your subsequent studies or vocations?
See you soon!
John