We held class on Zoom due to Thanksgiving travel plans. Briefly mentioned that there is one more slot open for the Tuesday night option for the project in the spring. Talked about our personal story project and the preliminary ideas we had about how we were going to present our stories. Might have a whole day of Moth stories during the last week of class, maybe outside. TLC (Technology Learning Center) could be a good resource for this project.

Introduced the Great Thanksgiving Listen project by watching a video. The project, run by StoryCorps involves people collecting stories from the people around them and submitting it online. All the stories will be put into the Library of Congress as a collection. Our task is to collect a story over break. In our prep note for next class we will relate the story we collected, discuss the process of collecting the story, and what makes it a story.

We looked at an example where two boys interviewed their father. We talked about the unstructured nature of the video and how it was a little different from the other stories we’ve seen. Brice brought up how there was very little reflection on the part of the boys. However, the questions the boys asked pushed their father to tell stories about himself. In this way, stories can come out of a discussion.

We thought about who we might collect our story from and how we can listen them into story. We brainstormed questions we could ask to connect with the story teller. We also thought how after we could use follow-up questions to prompt them into storytelling. Professor Dolson also mentioned that listening to stories being told to other people, potentially while traveling, could also be a viable option. Holiday times in particular are good for storytelling. Stories could also be collected just through normal conversation without asking any questions.

We should all try to read each other’s prep notes before next class so we can come to class ready to talk about the stories we’ve all collected. We will discuss why we think stories are so important and what effect we see stories have.