Elias Howe invented the sewing machine from an idea he got in a dream - a dream that he wrote down all the details of the next day. Lucky for him he had a journal and was driven to record. This semester when I set out to explain the journal I'm going to ask students to begin with a mission statement, something like: "I'm going to write in this journal in order to..." and the dot dot dot can stand for anything. I'll introduce the option of specializing the journal in some way. In the journal entries that they do on their own (outside of classroom prompts, of course) students can keep dream journals, travel journals, nature journals, sports journals, reading journals...whatever they can come up with. Once they've come up with a mission for their journal writings, or a specialization, I'll go around the room and ask people to say a little bit about what they are going to hope to capture in their pages. I'll write these on the board, and then have the whole class brainstorm a bit to come up with some possible prompts, or starting off points for each one. (I hate to admit this, I got this idea from someone outside of my CD group - Thanks, Oprah (!))
