Writing Selves, Exploring the City: Develop Experiential Learning and IT-enhanced Approaches to the Teaching of Life Writing

This project aims to develop experiential learning and IT-enhanced approaches to the teaching and learning of life narrative, a genre that has drawn increasing attention in literature classes that seek to combine creative practice and real-life experiences and reflections to enrich students’ learning experiences. Life writing texts frequently engage with topics of identity, memory, history, society, representation and agency, which are of much relevance to students situated in evolving socio-cultural and political environments in contemporary time. This project seeks to address two issues that are often raised in relation to teaching life writing: 1) how to encourage students to put what they have learnt in class to their own literary and creative practices, especially those who have little prior experience of creative writing or life writing? 2) How to connect students’ classroom learning to the broader society, from which various writers draw inspiration for their work? This project will seek to address these questions by develop teaching materials and approaches that cover three interlinked areas in the teaching of EN2721 The Art of Life Narrative: develop students’ analytical skills of literary writings, deepen students’ understanding and interests in creatively engage with the city and the urban life, encourage students to reflect on their own experiences and observations and share them on an ‘Experiencing the City’ website. The three-thronged approach reflects the nature of the course as the one that seeks to develop students’ interpretative and analytical skills of life narratives produced across space and time, as well as to encourage them to put their learning into practice through developing life writing project by drawing on their personal experiences, observations, and memories of the places that they are familiar with or want to explore further. The course will be carefully structured: students will read a range of life narratives and compose autobiographical fragments related to writing prompts in class. They will make use of an ‘Experiencing the City’ website that the requested TDG will be used to develop, to 1) develop their creative writing skills through the various writing prompts that the website listed; 2) engage with the city by documenting fragments, objects, and observations through following the guidelines on group activity posted on the website. They will design a life writing project and apply the literary and creative nonfiction writing techniques they acquire in class to their composition. Emphasizing process and creativity, students will make their own discovery through reading writing, developing a life writing project and engaging with the community. Students’ understanding of life writing as a genre will be deepened through the various individual and collaborative practices that connect their textual analysis and interpretation of different life narratives with their own creative practices through individual life writing exercises and the group project. Students will document their reflections and observations of the city and in relation to their own lived experiences through journal entries; they will also have the opportunity to share their thoughts and observations during class and through the online platform.