By Amy Dickinson
This exercise serves as both a means of introduction and a way to approach contexts. On the first day of class, I had the students—before exchanging names—free-write for a few minutes on the following prompts: What kinds of things decorated your walls at home? What is displayed on your walls now? Does this point to any ways in which you’ve changed over the past few years?
After writing, the students paired up to spend a few minutes engaged in “interviewing” a person they would then introduce to the class (i.e. the “interview exercise” on the resource database). One stipulation was that the interviewer must find out what was on the subject’s walls—in the past or present, embarrassing or not—and share it with the class. As introductions occurred, I compiled a list of wall decorations, many of which could be grouped into broad categories. We then discussed briefly the role of walls as “texts” and how walls communicate, to an audience, things about the people who live within them: their values, their interests, groups to which they belong, the kinds of things they’re willing to let represent them. We also touched on the ways the walls, as texts, might shift based on audience (e.g. will a parent be the audience and, if so, will the student necessarily be plastering the room with posters of alcohol paraphernalia?).
As a homework assignment, each student was asked to take the role of blank observer. S/he would pretend to be a stranger entering the student’s room (at a previous home or at school) and would write a character sketch of the type of person s/he believed lived in that room. The intent was to have students begin exploring roles they occupy, assumptions people make every day based on a variety of texts, and ways in which people choose to represent themselves.
