I can feel workshop philosophy impacting more areas of my life than what I typically thought of as the reading and writing contexts in which I teach utilizing workshop. I have started to realize that I apply the concept of learning from mentors all over. Recently I posted on my other blog about mentors for a type of scrapbooking, Project Life, that I am doing for the first time this year. Of course, scrapbooking when viewed as a combination of pictures and text in order to preserve memories can be a writing genre; however, I did not always recognize it as such. Over the last year I have been reflecting more and more on the power of the process of scrapbooking as a valuable asset to writer's workshop.
One of my favorite workshop related phrases is, "Read like a writer, and write like a reader." Once I found out that I was going to teach university level courses, I started to view my college coursework from two lenses. On the one hand, I was paying attention to the content. On the other I was "learning like a teacher", noticing how various professors set up their courses and built a sense of community within the classroom. A couple of weeks ago was the first week of my spring semester class. As the professor was getting started, I was taking some notes of what he was doing on my computer. One of my classmates sitting next to me looked over and asked quietly, "What are you doing? Writing down everything we do?" I tried not to laugh, knowing he was a bit incredulous that I would be taking notes when we weren't really to the content yet.
Workshop philosophy prompts a powerful mindset of constantly viewing the world and experiences from multiple lenses - of being able to embrace and enjoy experiences, while also reflecting on how the experiences impact us in order to improve who we are in various capacities - as readers, writers, teachers, scrapbookers, mothers... The possibilities are endless.
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