Working with Vellum

I want to introduce my English 100 students (first-year composition studies) to an experience of what I will hereafter call, "Working with Vellum." I will do this in a class that meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9.30 to 10.45 in the Fall 2017 semester. I bring this Experiential Learning Activity to my students to mark a threshold moment that serves as the boundary between our work with and interrogation of the process of literacy and our introduction to the Catholic Intellectual Tradition through the work of a medieval writer: Geoffrey Chaucer (14th century) and his _Canterbury Tales_. With my first-year writers, I will be intentional about the point of the Working with Vellum activity. The first-year writers will know that after the Working with Vellum activity, the class will be embarking on an interrogation of a medieval text, a medieval author, and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition. The Working with Vellum activity will involve one week or two class periods. On one day, I will ask them to locate a meaningful quotation from a medieval author, philosopher, or religious figure that speaks to them and that they want to immortalize along with an image of their own design or one that they have copied from a medieval image. On the second day, I will present them with a power point that includes images of them working on and with the vellum. When I show the students the power point and then again in their reflection essays, I will ask students to ponder their work and their guided, mentored experience with me and Matt Burgy (a local Dayton artist) at the helm. In their reflection essays after the week of Working with Vellum is complete, I will ask them to return to the idea of literacy and specifically write about the experience of making contact with a medieval medium like vellum, to think about what it means for them to depart from the technology of their contemporary world and make contact with another time, to reflect on how the experience of drawing and writing on vellum changed them and their future selves, and to consider what insights they may have developed from listening to their peers' experiences. 

I will use the funds to offer a stipend to the local-Dayton artist (Matt Burgy) who will visit our class ($200); to purchase vellum cut sheets and scraps at Pergamena ($100); and to purchase micron pens of all shapes, sizes, and colors ($200).

I am intentionally trying to meet the outcome of helping students make connections between the experience of the Working with Vellum Experiential Learning activity and their sense of the world and their place in it. More precisely, I aim to have them interrogate their choice of major, their career goals, their vocational aspirations, and their development into thoughtful, sensitive, and complicated adults who can deploy practical wisdom and learship skills int ehri lives and in their work. I also aim to introduce the concept of personal growth as the students depart from the comfort of their modern technology-filled lives and wander into a dimension of a medieval medium (that is still produced today!). I want them to choose meaningful quotations and to create compelling images, and I will mention this desire of mine when I introduce the activity and the hunt for quotations and art.

- Miriamne Krummel