After a range of activities at the Winter retreat and Personal Development classes to develop ideas, students met up with both the Bayan professors to share their preliminary written SMART plan brainstorms. During these individual conferences, Bayan scholars received feedback, and subsequently revised and added in their journals more ideas into their prewriting.
After all that, students had developed quite a lot of content they could use to create a statement, a narrative of their goals. In the English class, writers began to shape that content into a formal essay.
To do so, students analyzed three “founding documents” of the United States: "The Declaration of Independence," The Preamble to the Constitution, and an excerpt of Thomas Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense.” Our purpose was less about the content than about the “moves” the authors used to express their ideas, the decisions they made around structuring their content - the "bite" the authors' patterns of expression.
For instance, the Preamble is basically made up of three “chunks,” three distinct moves that answer the questions:
- Who are we?
- What’s our collective problem?
- What do we propose to do?
