Imagination Longview 2011: What Really Happens When You Write to Learn

This year's Imagination Longview was by far the best one yet: high attendance, committed WAC faculty sponsors, keen interest of attendees, and a room full of fascinating and inspiring student projects which fueled enough conversations to keep the Education Center abuzz with voices for two solid hours.  To say students were passionate about their ideas seems like a gross understatement.

To wit, here's some of what I learned:

• about the place of comic books in World War II among troops and at home and the depiction of Hitler as the obvious villain
• why physician-assisted suicide may not not be compatible with an American vision of democracy and health care

• how a service learning project to collect purses for abused women served by an agency called Veronica's Voice led to an ongoing connection with Longview students who intend to continue their project beyond this semester

• how Longview students created an onsite vegetable garden with kindergarteners at a local to have a direct impact on promoting a healthy diet for children

• about what happens when you read between the lines of Hemingway's short story "The Hills are Like Elephants"  
• about how a student discovered the lives and stories of her family members, long ago separated by slavery, through a chance introduction to a local artist when she was completing an assignment

• how much Aldous Huxley's Brave New World has to say about issues like privacy and choice
  
• that a popular video game directly reflects the influence of the character James Bond and includes numerous visual allusions to Alfred Hitchcock
• the powerfeul connections between an Intercultural Communications class and an ESL class

• how you can accurately estimate costs of a complicated construction project by graphing the salient variables
• why a student chose to spend the semester analyzing Ella Fitzgerald's version of the Cole Porter song I Concentrate on You

• what happened when a whole new world was created in the collaborative novel written by students in an Anthropology-Creative Writing learning community
• what it feels like to set a goal of running a marathon and then reflect on achieving that goal

There were even serendipitous moments like the one where a student who'd just won an impressive $30,000 scholarship to the school of his choice disclosed to me that he'd presented at Imagination Longview a few years back and here met the woman who became instrumental in his academic success as his teacher and mentor. She happened to visit his table and they struck up a conversation about his project.

And that is perhaps what Imagination Longview is really all about: learning through writing and, in the telling of the learning, connecting people to ideas as well as to other people.  I don't know of a better reason to write!