On wikis...

I decided to use wikis for my creative expressions class. It is an elective class where I have the freedom to teach anything fun related to English. I have taught theater, creative writing, yearbook, film, musical lyrics, and a whole range of other topics in just the past year.

This year I am hoping to re-visit the Broadway Theater Project. A theater program I started at Broadway High School, the north Minneapolis alternative school for pregnant and parenting teens. At Broadway, I successfully had the students write, produce, and star in a semi-autobiographical theatrical production about being a teen parent in America today.

I would like to take what I learned at Broadway and adapt the curriculum for use in the ALC I now work at.

With that in mind, I am going to take my wonderful friend Nicole's idea and use a wiki to create a collaborative creative writing environment.

Each student will write poetry about their own life, and in the voice of fictional characters. Then, we will use the wiki to create a cast of characters, a plot, and, eventually, a script. All of the initial writing will be done by individual students, and thus I hope to avoid quite so many creative conflicts, while the script itself will be created by the class working in small groups.

I may use also flesh out this unit as my final project so that it will be ready to go next semester.

After looking at Matt Barton's composition wikibook and the media literacy wikibook I have a few basic ideas about organizing my wiki. However, I am concerned about how some of my students will take having their work altered in even the slightest way by their peers. I will have to do a lot of scaffolding for collaboration, and I'm still trying to formulate how that will look.

I think I will do a smaller creative writing unit with blogs and peer review first. Then a unit on reading poetry and spoken word, maybe with the Poetry Out Loud people. Then I will have them write the poetry that will go into the play, and finally, I will explain how the play will actually be written.

Here is the wiki so far.

We'll see if I have time this year for even a staged reading. I hope so.