Connected Learning Through Community - Nanowrimo

Written by Tommy Buteau
May 23, 2014

What does it mean to be connected? An interesting question for educators to think about. Another one might be, “How can we show students the power behind community and connected learning?” One way might be to allow students to create a book together that celebrates the connections between people, one that displays beauty, subtlety, and thematic continuity through these connections. If being connected means to be interrelated and independent, would authors become connected by creating a collection of interrelated stories that each have an independent voice? Perhaps, but what if the process could be created in a way that the connections between the students allowed for the creation of the final product? Could classroom convesations led by students’ ideas really allow a diverse group to achieve something that would be impossible for a single independent writer to imagine? Yes, but how?

When I found out I that I would have a year-long creative writing class, I was excited, and also a bit terrified. I had successfully taught a semester course, but how would I ever come up with enough ideas to fill a whole year? Then I had a brilliant idea; why not open it up to students? In the spirit of inquiry and connected learning, I asked my classes what they wanted to work on.

There were many different ideas bandied about, all of them excellent and profound, but one intrigued me. The student asked, “I’m going to try doing Nanowrimo next month. Why don’t we all try to do it?”

Now, I had heard of Nanowrimo, and knew the basic premise, but I needed to find out more. When I went to their webpage and searched around, I found myself thinking, “Ah, this is nothing more than a basic self-motivating contest in which people enter and track how many words they write over a month. The goal is to reach fifty thousand words–not an easy goal for your average non-committed senior trying to obtain the required fourth credit via a creative writing class. But there is no requirement for consistency, nor quality; it is just a straight record of how many words you write.”

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The format was appealing to me because it requires discipline while also giving the participant the ability to suck, and my “no-fault philosophy” allows me to enjoy a project with those kinds of expectation.

I knew it would have to be adapted for my purposes though. Many of my students consider a 2,500 word final assignment to be a pretty lofty goal for a month. But what if we did it as a class? If each student wrote 2,500 words, we could easily surpass the fifty thousand requirement. I also liked the idea of entering as a class because it is kind of breaking the rules, so I could pitch that to appeal to the adolescent predilection for risky operations.

Now I just needed to figure out how to get the students to create a story that flowed together, was connected, and provided space for everyone to bring their own voice into the project.

Nanowrimo Context

I had been reading one of David Levithan’s books, The Realm of Possibility, and it seemed like a pretty neat way to have each student create a story that was connected and yet written in different voices. In the book, there is one school, and twenty voices. Each chapter is in a different voice, and you don’t really see all of the connections between the characters till you are a few chapters in. Each of the characters are very unique, and they have their own perspective on the world. Yet, they are connected because they go to the same school at the same time.

So, in October, the month before the competition, I started to read chapters from Levithan’s book to the class. They were intrigued, perhaps because there is controversial themes and characters in the book, or perhaps because it is in first person verse, but the students engaged with the story.

There were several ideas I wanted to convey to my creative writing students through this project, and this book helped with some of those concepts. First, the characters are talking about things that mattered to them, and I wanted the students to visualize the characters they were creating and to understand that not everything a character thinks is continuous, yet there is a foundation to characters, and people, that comes through in most of their thought patterns. Everyone falls into the idea that their perspective is “the perspective,” but one major difference between an author and a character is that the author has to see a perspective other than his/her own. Second, a story can make sense and be very powerful even if it is not linear. Third, sometimes a collection of stories about a place or an event can be much more powerful than a single story. I guess the post-modernists helped cement that idea down.

Another context study that worked well came in the form of a movie. As students were discussing what central event they might use for our story and how the individual chapter stories could be interrelated, I asked each student to turn in a five hundred word proposal detailing their central event and the required characters. While thinking and writing this, I allowed them to watch the movie Valentines Day. It worked well for this as it is a collection of interrelated characters and their stories. Most had not seen it, everyone enjoyed it, and all were able to describe how overlapping stories offer many unique ways to approach storytellng.

One particular approach allowed in this type of storytelling is the art of facade–when a character says something, yet the audience understands it differently than the character does, it is called a facade. With this type of interrelated storytelling, you will find frequent examples of this because the audience has a chance to hear about a situation from many different characters’ perspectives. When young writers learn of this, it can become a game to include some connections like this in their writting.

Nanowrimo Process

The amount of learning that came about through giving the students control completely surprised me. I expected the engagement to be fairly high, but the format of the project truly allowed students at all levels to perform, to develop their voice, and to exceed my expectations. The project was student driven, and many of the techniques we used were uncovered just through collaboration, discussion, experimentation, and play in the classroom. The use of social media for peer reviews, a real world competition for motivation, and Google Drive for collaboration all helped to allow students to bring forth their own unique ways of seeing the world in an artistic and creative way.

Granted, I was lucky to have a truly diverse group of students, a few of which were very high performing and motivated, but the process allowed them to extend their connection to the project through mentoring and peer editing with students who provided a variety of voices. I have never had students take a project so far before, and I believe the process detailed here allowed for far reaching self-organization with learning as the emergent phenomenon.

I did this with two different classes. The class that worked out the best was bigger. It had about 25 participating students. My smaller class only had about fifteen participating students, and that was too few to achieve the flow and continuity necessary to create a coherent story in a short amount of time. You need enough strong writers to create the foundation of the story and to be the voices of the main characters. If you only have a few really strong writers, there is not enough for the other students to grab onto and create interesting stories around. The smaller class foundered because the main characters and story were not well enough developed to inspire interesting side stories. For this review, I will discuss only the larger class.

Planning

Remember, November is a short month because you will have Thanksgiving break at the end. So with the planning at the beginning and a block schedule, I only really had about five classes for the students to compose and do revisions in.

I started the planning phase with the class in October. Written into the rules of Nanowrimo are guidelines; you can plan and outline anything you want before the month begins, but you may only write on the 50,000 words once November begins.

So, a couple of weeks into October, I gave the students some information on Nanowrimo. I introduced the idea that Nanowrimo is not a school project. It is an outside project that anyone can enter, and we would be trying to attain it as a community of writers. I encouraged my students to enter on their own in addition to what we were doing in class. I worked out the math with them, and let them know how many words they would have to write–about 3,000 per student. I also let them know that I didn’t know if it was technically or morally right for us to enter as a class. I always like to include a little bit of risk when possible as this increases the engagement for the students.

I let them know about my idea for doing something similar to what David Levithan had done in his book The Realm of Possibility, which we had been reading aloud in class. Each student could write separate yet related stories, and then we could combine them to submit for Nanowrimo. I also offered the idea that the story would have to somehow relate to many different characters and be in a location that was familiar to all of the authors in the room, for how can you create a story without a sense of place?

The class voted to enter Nanowrimo, so I proposed that each student come to the next class with an idea about a central event that all the stories could be related to, a location that is familiar to all participants, and an ideas for a name for our group to use when I enter us on the Nanowrimo site.

The next class, we shared our ideas, and voted for the one to work on. This was a fascinating event, for the students really got into some of the ideas and discussed all sorts of eventualities trying to narrow down our concept. There was a wide range of ideas and genres. Everything from romances to alien invasions were discussed, and the final vote was for a realistic school shooting story.

At this point, I had to have a discussion about the reality that we were writing in a school and it is not easy to have a whole class focused on a violent story about a shooting. We agreed that nothing explicitly violent, sexual, nor vulgar would be permitted. Yet, I also told them that I wanted them, as seniors, to be able to write about ideas that they were interested in and that were relevant for their lives. They appreciated this and promised to refrain from writing anything that would get me fired.

The most engaging discussion may have been on the name for our group. We settled on “Third Hour Shooter” since it went along with the story, but “Illuminaughty” gave it a good run.

We also spoke at this point about the need for different roles to be fulfilled if this was going to end up as a cohesive story. The roles of editors, illustrators for the cover artwork, and organizers to read and order the finished stories were accepted by various members of the class.

Nanowrimo Engagement

Once the process brought us to a point where we had a location and an event, we started taking ideas and writing them on the board. We first discussed what characters would be necessary, and people volunteered for different central characters. This was a surprising discussion for me in several ways.

I expected all of the high-performing students to take the central roles, but they were actually mixed around. The critical central roles were taken by a couple of the best writers in class, but many of the central supporting roles were not. The student who I thought was the most engaged and talented writer, for example, didn’t claim any character. On her own, she later created a beautifully rendered and reflective minor character. Because of this mix, some of the characters’ importance to the story got shifted. Minor characters helped to shape the portrait of the school, and this pastiche format helped every student in the class realize that their voice was a component of the picture. Another book that would be interesting to use for this type of project may be The House on Mango Street, but I felt David Levithan’s book was more related to my students’ lives.

The other interesting thing that happened in this discussion was how the story was developed up. The student who had the central idea for the story told us the details, and then students began to ask questions and make suggestions for additional characters. Much of the story line was developed here, for each new character required an updating and refinement of the plot. Multiple subplots were developed, and this went on for quite some time.

Then we created a timeline and began to place where the individual stories would fit. This took some explaining, for some students still didn’t understand that each story had to be related, but they didn’t need to be temporally close, nor did they have to be about a central character. Because of this conversation, we included stories from different times. For example, one story was a reflection on the event from a person twenty years later. And it was interesting to provide a foundational event from one of the character’s childhood, something that let the audience know why a character responds the way s/he does in a situation.

This is a reflective technique for characters that comes out in literature all the time, yet it was not something my students would have thought to do without this connecting conversation.

Nanowrimo Outlining

This is a reflective technique for characters that comes out in literature all the time, yet it was not something my students would have thought to do without this connecting conversation.