ShareRiff Says

Javier

Wow, what can I say about your WTE? Incredible. Your courageous narrative pulls your readers into real issues via a real-life story, in the first person. Kudos for realizing that your immediate audience is a group of students (LLS students) who are interested in like homelessness  and mental illness, and for crafting an exploration that balances concrete description, sound reasoning in the wake of provocative claims, and substantiating statistics that generated a tremendous amount of attention and feedback. The proof is in the pudding, as they say! I really do think that your WTE is more than just an exploration, though. I think that you essentially have the basic recipe for leveraging serious learning value, here. The basic 1102 recipe is simple--blog about stuff, revisit those blogs, and apply the techniques prescribed during each subsequent unit assignment to develop/remix those blogs into products geared towards specific audiences/purposes/contexts (informative, persuasive, expository, evaluative, definitional, problem-solving, etc). I'm not saying that you have to continue to develop the narrative aspect--rather, I am saying that you can grow all manner of claims, reasoning, and substantiation in the "gutters," as McCloud would say.

It was also a pleasure watching the emergence of "Poop: How Gross National Happiness Could Save the World." You and your collaborators displayed your process in a way that I think was instructive for the whole class. Here, the readers you are appealing to (those of us who take toilets for granted) are informed because you and your group shift the terms of an issue (climate injustice and it's effects) from a focus on commonplace narratives about "the environment" that are often abstract and Romanticized,  to a focus on the human inhabitants of particular places on Earth that suffer from the "race to the bottom" in an age when their is a surfeit (rather than a scarcity) of pollution, waste, and environmental devastation, all of which is distributed in an unjust manner. The deleterious effects of the market economy are felt by those who already hardly participate in the market economy at all. By focusing on the taboo subject of feces, the most basic "externality" of consumption, you and your collaborators define key terms in Shiva's map of environmental justice (and a host of other quirky and interesting concepts)  in an accessible, and therefore informative, way. Nice work.