At first, I felt enthusiastic about sharing the ways that my school writing experiences related to sociocultural understandings of writing, but then I realized that most of them didn’t. I can think of very few writing experiences, tasks, or activities that went beyond the four walls of my school. However, one writing activity does come to mind. At some point in junior high, we wrote letters to a company of our choice outlining either a displeasure or a satisfaction with a product/experience that we had with their company. As a class, we spent a lot of time brainstorming together – sharing stories about experiences we had. At the time, I had recently opened a 24 pack of Sprite at home only to find that one of the cans was completely hollow. Somehow the machinery at the company did not fill this can before it was packaged and sent to production. The idea that this could happen had never before crossed my mind, and I was already incredibly interested in that concept. I had shared this very story with anyone that would listen a couple of weeks prior. Never in a million years did I consider that I would get the opportunity to write about this experience in school, nor did I consider that little old 7th grade me could contact the Coca-Cola Company. I was SO excited to write about this experience. I was motivated to share my opinion in a way that formally expressed my displeasure without being rude. As stated by MacArthur et al, “Learning to write within a certain domain is closely integrated with learning the knowledge, forms of reasoning, criteria of evaluation, and forms of action in that domain.” I was certainly on board to learn this. After all, our teacher had showed us an example from a previous class in which the student actually received free merchandise from the company as retribution! The next couple months were exhilarating as my classmates received responses from various companies – expressing regrets or gratitude – some sending coupons and others free products. Several students, including myself, took it upon ourselves to write additional letters on our own time. How meaningful and socially relevant is this? It’s interesting to me that this is one of the only writing experiences I remember. How come all of our assignments weren’t like this? How come I don’t have more assignments like this?

Specific things I might do in my classroom:

• Write a letter to a company outlining a displeasure or satisfaction with a product/experience that we had with their company
• Flying horse entries
• Poetry café
• Wax museum
• Writing our own reader’s theater
• Write a publish a series of storybooks – each with a main character from a different cultural background
• “Flood of Memories” writing activity – In this activity, students are to begin by drawing a map of their neighborhood and marking different significant events/feeling with the places on their maps while also jotting down memories associated with their drawings. Students can then produce a personal narrative that is derived from this map.
• Lineage poems
• Cultural artifact paper – Have your students collect 3-5 artifacts that represent something about their lives outside of school and that symbolize aspects of their culture. Talk about these artifacts as a class, in a small group, or with another person. Have the students complete some free write (recommended about 5 minutes each) to a series of prompts. A good prompt example would be: Write about the significance of the artifact to you; try to explore all possible meanings. Try to go beyond pat statements to ways in which what this artifact represents colors your whole view of life. If we were to remove what this artifact represents from your life, how would your life be different? How would you be different? Then, write a paper about it. Be open to letting the paper take you in any direction that feels right. The idea would be to reveal a lot about yourself and your culture indirectly through the artifact.
• Where I’m From Poem

(These last several ideas I got from the following website by typing “cultural writing activities into my search engine” : http://jupiter.plymouth.edu/~megp/test/CulturalUnderstanding.htm It’s truly amazing how simple it is to access ideas for such meaningful/wonderful culturally relevant activities in your class. I mean, it is LITERALLY at our fingertips!).