Our first major project for this class was titled "Repurposing an Argument." We were asked to find a piece we had already written and repurpose it with a new audience and a new and elaborative argument. The coolest part about this assignment was it was completely subjective, along with the rest of the work we've done this semester. This meant it was pretty much guaranteed that my project would be unique. When I first read the prompt, I actually was really nervous about this project. Not because it was going to be a lot of work, but because I had zero idea as to what previous writing I would pick to repurpose. I started reading through old essays from my English and Philosophy classes from last year. Boring, boring, boring, was all I got. Then I stumbled upon my very last essay that I wrote for English 125, titled "Beauty Myth: Just for Women?" It was a comparative essay in which I used the texts "My Body, My Weapon, My Shame," by Elwood Reid and "The Beauty Myth," by Naomi Wolf. The argument I made was that the trouble with appearance culture does not solely affect women, but men as well. I focused on the idea that society is indeed the most judgmental person everyone knows. You can read my original piece and essentially the inspiration behind my experience in this class here. 

 

As an education major, I really wanted my projects to have to do with education. So, I started thinking. Bullying and low self-esteem are major underlying social issues in schools today and is a subject that really tugs at my heart strings, so why not look into it further? I did some research, and I found out that in transition periods (elementary to middle school or middle to high school), kids self-esteem drops by double-digit percentages. This information got me very mad, I mean walking around my house telling all seven of my housemates these statistics mad. If we know that this is such a large issue, why are there minimal to no changes or preventative measures being taken by teachers, administrators, etc.? My personal mission as a teacher (located in my computer note titled "Things to Do as a Teacher" and "How to Be a Great Teacher") is to have a safe and accepting classroom to students of all diversity, allowing each and every child that provides me the fortune of teaching them the opportunity to feel like they can achieve any and all of their dreams and goals. How perfectly related these two were. So I thought about how I could repurpose this into something unique. I revisited a lesson a teacher named Kyle Schwartz in Colorado started. You may have seen it on CNN or The Washington Post, titled "I Wish My Teacher Knew." This activity was meant for students to share with their teachers anything they'd like to...from personal issues at home, to why they were excited for that class, to what they ate for breakfast that morning. Schwartz received all sorts of responses to this question, from "I wish my teacher knew I don't have a friend to play with me," to "I wish my teacher knew she's a great teacher." Similar to my mission, Schwartz was promoting a safe and accepting classroom by allowing students to open up to her, making it easier for her to cater to each of them individually. I decided from here that the audience to my argument would be transition teachers (aka sixth grade). 

 

So, for my repurposing project I chose to work in the medium of child narratives. What better way to encompass a prevalent issue like this than to put yourself into the shoes of the child being made fun of, the child experiencing racism first hand, or the child with the lowest self-esteem. I did some research on typical middle school problems causing lower self-esteem as well as different middle school "lingo." I stepped back into the world of swag, and I wrote narratives in the voices of sixth graders, including a writing prompt for context. I didn't want it to seem as if I was doing no work with just one narrative, so I started with two. My first draft you can read here. After feedback from my blog groups and Shelley, this turned into five narratives! I wrote from perspectives of children of different races, genders, "popularity" levels, and religions. By my final draft, I added different fonts to make the writing appear to be actually hand-written by sixth graders. After lots of revision and reflection on this issue, I came to my final product, in which you can read here.