In the fall of 2006, President Duncan brought the importance of community stories to our attention, motivating me to use a new approach to my teaching of World literature. On the first day, I invited my students to write a short piece of their stories—this could be a past important event or the day’s events so far. As the semester progressed, I asked them to retell their story three times in the style of one of the authors or stories that we had read. They had the following options:

• They could retell the same story three times.           
• They could change their story.
• They could fictionalize.
• For each of the three papers, they had a choice of three different authors/works to imitate.

They also had three requirements:

• They had to use literary elements in their story appropriate to the literary elements in the work they were using as a model (theme, setting, symbol, figures of speech, sound devices, form etc.).
• They also had to write a 1-2 page analysis of the source work pointing out the elements mentioned above and using specific quotes from the original work.
• They had to document their analysis.

I saw the following favorable results:

• Students tended to read the original texts carefully knowing that they would have to imitate its literary elements.
• Students enjoyed the chance to be creative as evidenced in their responses to my end of semester survey. They also enjoyed sharing their work with one another in class (on a volunteer basis only—never required.). This led to some lively discussions and a sense of learning community.

Please click the links to go to the assignment sheet and survey.