This series of fiction letters were written in response to discussion and mid quarter self evaluation assignment, and were included in my mid quarter self evaluation packet, but I thought I would share them here as well. This is a series of three fictionalized communications from a character to different people, highlighting how past experiences, perspective, and circumstance change experiences and change how people recount those experiences. Some of it comes from my the feeling I have myself that I can talk a lot about what happened and how it happened and why it happened and how it connects to all the other things that happen, but I can’t create, in a sense, a unified theory that can be used to formulate what actions should be taken to address what happens. (This ‘happening’ could be anything from a protest to a personal event to a program lecture, it doesn’t reference any particular event.)
Devlin,
We need to have a discussion about how we’re responding to the experiences we’ve had over the last week.
You said that you were putting together a time to meet and discuss and decompress. Do you have an idea when that’s happening? I can start disseminating info whenever you need.
If we decide to do a teach back or take an official stance, I think a good format might be a panel or a discussion time. Maybe some pre-determined questions we can answer, and then some audience questions.
If we want to take an official stance, it’s going to have to be very carefully phrased. We need to make sure we have a distinct difference between what we’re saying from our personal experience and position, and what we’ve decided to state as a group that represents as many of our true opinions and experiences and universal agreement as possible. And that’s gonna be a real long discussion to figure everything out and make sure everyone can agree with what we have, and get as much feedback and as much validation of everyone’s experiences as possible.
It needs to be a good chunk of time, maybe it should be two sessions to figure it out if we wanted to take an official stance.
Let me know what you want to happen, and feel free to bounce any ideas at all off me.
– Farah.