ENGL C101 Guide for Melanie Jeffrey: Unit 2: Thinking Critically about how Identity is Constructed

An American non-profit organization whose mission is to record, preserve, and share the stories of Americans from all backgrounds and beliefs.

Self-awareness is an integral component to navigating the world more comfortably. By taking some time to think about and understand your own culture and where you come from you will be better able to address difficult questions from people who might see you and the world differently than you do.

This I Believe is based on a 1950s radio program of the same name, hosted by acclaimed journalist Edward R. Murrow. Each day, Americans gathered by their radios to hear compelling essays from the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Robinson, Helen Keller, and Harry Truman as well as corporate leaders, cab drivers, scientists, and secretaries—anyone able to distill into a few minutes the guiding principles by which they lived. These essayists’ words brought comfort and inspiration to a country worried about the Cold War, McCarthyism, and racial division.

Co-sponsored by The Ohio State University and Georgia State University, The DALN (daln.osu.edu) is a publicly available archive of personal literacy narratives in a variety of formats (text, video, audio) that together provide a historical record of the literacy practices and values of contributors, as those practices and values change.

The DALN invites people of all ages, races, communities, backgrounds, and interests to contribute stories about how — and in what circumstances — they read, write, and compose meaning, and how they learned to do so (or helped others learn).

We welcome personal narratives about reading and composing all kinds of texts, both formal and informal: diaries, blogs, poetry, music and musical lyrics, fan zines, school papers, videos, sermons, gaming profiles, speeches, chatroom exchanges, text messages, letters, stories, photographs, etc. We also invite contributors to supplement their narratives with samples of their own writing (papers, letters, zines, speeches, etc.) and compositions (music, photographs, videos, sound recordings, etc.).