Toni Morrison & Ocean Vuong Worksheet & Meaning Making Writes Podcast Discussion

Related links for the first assignment 

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/..

.https://onbeing.org/programs/ocean-vuong-a-life-worthy-of-our-breath-2022/

second assignment – 

Turn your attention back to the “3 Miles” podcast and the statement, “Dropped into foreign lands [the university], they are asked to mentally imagine that they belong.” Connect this to

1. Toni Morrison’s statement: “The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined, and possible lives of its speakers, readers, and writers”; and

2. David Foster Wallace’s argument that the value of a liberal arts education is NOT freedom to think for ourselves; instead it is freedom from “our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation” (IOW: freedom from our ego and self-centeredness).

3. Ocean Vuong’s argument that we get “played” when we believe we are not participants in language and being “played” means we surrender agency, lose ourselves, our freedom, our civil liberties (~37:00). Instead, we need “reclaim language as a treatise for the future” (~1:07).

Finally, consider the ways in which the above approaches to education, language, and literacy might help you expand the definition you wrote in your first MMW: What is an English class?