When coming up with ideas for our collage, it was a lot easier to find the differences between our literacy narratives than the similarities. Because our narratives weren’t very similar, one being about a difficult book read in middle school and the other about learning Hebrew for a Bat Mitzvah; we wanted to highlight the differences, but also show that even though our stories seemed opposite, we could find ways they related. We chose the main image to be a book, one of the main connections between our narratives, but split the halves of the book into the novel one of us read, and Hebrew text for the other. We wanted to have an obvious contrast between our experiences, but sort of meet in the middle where we found connections. We did focus mainly on contrast in our collage, but we also chose to have a prominent center alignment to point out similarities. We wanted to show how our stories contrasted, but bring the focus to the center of the image, where they overlapped. Even though our narratives were very different, we wanted our sides to be close in proximity, again showing that no matter how far apart our experiences seemed, we could still find commonalities. The biggest similarity we had was the emotional challenge in both of our experiences, one being a difficult language to learn, and one being a heavy book to read. Another major similarity was the time in our lives that this occurred, for both of us it was around middle school. We wanted to portray this difficulty by showing the language and the book cover. Even if the book cover isn’t familiar to the viewer, the complexity in learning a language, especially one like Hebrew, can be seen.
Writing is a PROCESS Not a Product