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Thursday evening group: Stories about the World, Stories about Us

HCRL's picture

Hello everyone,

I hope you all had fantastic summers! I am extremely excited for our first session on Thursday Sept. 10 (2nd week of classes). You are going to have a little time in Jody's class to start thinking about that session, so I wanted to provide you with information about the current plan for our literacy group. 

The title is Stories about the World, Stories about Us: A club for reading, writing, and discussing the news.  We will spend around 2 weeks on various current event/issues. One session we will read, discuss, and write about an article that critically explores the big picture of the topic, and the other week we will focus on a short personal narrative written by someone who experienced the event. We can switch up the order. The topics will be decided by all of us planners, heavily based on specific suggestions (such as the elections) or general ideas (women's issues abroad) that women at RCF have.

For our first topic, we are going to focus on 10 years post Katrina, and how white and Black communities seem to percieve the
recovery differently. I am thinking this will be our main big picture article: http://www.colorlines.com/articles/perception-reality-poll-finds-racial-gap-new-orleans-residents’-view-post-katrina-renewal . These are two other good articles, but I think are too long, especially for our first class: http://www.npr.org/2015/08/15/432254189/in-measuring-post-katrina-recovery-a-racial-gap-emergeshttp://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/10-years-after-katrina-new-new-orleans-leaves-many-behind/. Think about how you want to structure our session. Feel free to incorporate elements from the other two articles.

Looking forward to getting started! If you ever have any questions, feel free to email me at rlaskin@haverford.edu.