Transcript

Creating a Class-Sourced Novel | Jay Rehak | TEDxNorthwesternU

for the past 27 years I have had the good fortune and great honor to be a Chicago Public School language arts teacher throughout my career I have tried my best to connect with each and every one of my students with the thousands that I've met and had the privilege to know I've done this because I believe that it enhances the learning environment because I think it's the key to our survival and because it brings joy and meaning to my life 23 years ago I was working at Daniel Webster elementary school in Lawndale and they had a hard day at work I walked outside on the north onto pulaski north what started walking north on pulaski towards the CTA blue line when three young men attacked me from behind hit me on the head with what i believe to be a bag of nickels staggered i got up and the three young men were now standing in front of me and i rubbing my head i asked him i said why did you do that they kind of left they said we want your money and i thought about it for a second and it kind of bothered me i thought if you wanted my money that badly you should have asked me and so I looked at him and I said no and I ran into Pulaski thinking that if I somehow stopped traffic maybe somebody would take pity on me and help me out but instead a fourth young man came across the street with a golf club and he swung it at my head but I blocked it with my briefcase but then he came around and he hit me on the thigh and as he did I went on the ground and I was surrounded suddenly by four young men whom I did not know who wanted to hurt me and then I heard a voice on the sidewalk came the voice and said wait stop I know that man and everybody backed off and from the sidewalk came one of my eighth graders and he bent down he picked up my briefcase and he helped me up and put his arm around me and he walked into the blue line train on the Congress expressway the whole time he kept saying they shouldn't have done that to him mister react they shouldn't have done that to you now on that day that young man put himself in someone else's shoes and I've never forgotten the courage of that young man and I'm happy to tell you that he's a facebook friend of mine right now now I've had many other instances of connected with NIST with my students none of them quite as dramatic but none of them any less profound over the past 10 years my students and I have collaborated on a large number of books many of them nonfiction but in the last three years my students and I have collaborated on nine novels now while we stand proud for every one of those books we understand that none of them are probably gonna ever make it to the New York Times bestseller list probably but that's not the point more important than the products we created are the is the process that we use to make those Diaz turned into reality and what we learned as collaborators will serve each of us all 573 co-authors and I for the rest of our lives and I believe is the key to 21st century survival this is because we are living in an age of unprecedented worldwide collaboration and shared experience and the ability to work together and respect one another not only face to face but remotely will make or break this generation in every generation in the future now I'd like to just take a second and have everyone consider the world that my co-authors were born into because it's not quite the same as the one I was born into in 1998 Google was invented the year before JK Rowling wrote a book called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and that seven book series has sold over 400 million copies worldwide and while every language arts teacher in the world owes a debt of gratitude to miss Rowling for encouraging young people to read more importantly is the phenomenon that occurred a few years later because in 2001 excuse me in 2001 the first of many Harry Potter fanfiction websites went up and an amazing thing happened people from all over the world started sharing chapters of Harry Potter they started adding to a story that they did not write in fact that one website has had over 300,000 chapters of Harry Potter fanfiction written now the question is why why were they doing this the it couldn't have been for the money because they weren't getting paid so why would they write this the answer was because they could because the technology was available and what those muggles understood was if they created something there was a venue for it and they would be part they would become part of a bigger community and that larger community made them somehow bigger than themselves and that was enough now the Internet has allowed each of us to become contributors and collaborators each one of us shares online regularly of some quick and easy examples in 2001 wikipedia was invented and since that time over 500 million people have contributed shared or otherwise use that website in 2004 Facebook was invented and we have currently where there are 1.2 billion people or sharing creating and otherwise interacting with media on that forum and of course there's also Google Docs and Google shareware which have also enhanced this now in 2006 Jeffrey Howe of Wired magazine in the term crowd-sourced to define this phenomenon of sharing ideas and content online in 2006 my students and I collaborated on a book of 101 grammar lessons and as we collaborated on that on that we realized that excuse me that I'm sorry 2006 we yeah we collaborated on this Lucy oh well yeah well and what we learned obviously has helped us to navigate the world as we know it a quick slide that I'd like to show you for those of you who might denigrate self-published authors this is a list so the question is how did we create these these books there's a five step process to writing a novel step one I created a chapter that was shareable and relatable to my students shared it on a blog in our case I had 30 seniors at the time in 2012 we worked on this novel called 30 days to empathy I wrote the first chapter I tried to make it relatable and shareable and what the protagonist is is a burned-out senior and he wants to get out of there and he believes that everyone in his class is a  that he is the superior human being now his high school teacher tries to encourage him to be up that ik and he agrees that he will try to learn how to become empathetic and so the next day when he wakes up he's one of the females in the class that was the premise of the book I asked each of the students to go home and write a day in their lives and they did and to be honest with you when they wrote the book I thought well they wrote their chapters I thought it was going to be humorous that's not what happened Sally who wrote the third chapter of the book wrote her story about living with two other young women in what was essentially a drug den and she was constantly harassed by men of all ages and she was a cutter she cut herself and she worked at Potbelly's at night so that she could pay her rent it sort of helped me understand why she slept in my class the second part of the process was I created a Google document spreadsheet where I asked each of the students to list the characters and other elements of the story I also explained to them that this spreadsheet and this outline would change would be fungible but the good news was within a week of creating this spreadsheet we had a rough outline from the book and also within a week we had a rough first draft of our book now the third step of the process again excuse me the third third step of the process was peer editors put students in the groups of four and had them edit each other's works and this was important because we were obviously looking for grammar errors and logical inconsistencies but it also for students to realize that they might have to make some changes and this is important because a lot of writers believe that what they write is akin to a biblical text that somehow cannot be changed but because the students were sharing their work with each other they realized at times that they had to make some adjustments they also realized that potentially I'd have to tear it up and start over step four I brought in the perfectionist there's always some in the class people who delight in finding fault with all the other people they did an edit I also had my students at this point anybody who wanted to illustrate the book had the opportunity to submit a cover I also had one student who was was hadn't submitted yet and so the class tried to cajole him into the finish line and we kept on encouraging him and he wound up finally writing his chapter and it was about his drug use and about his nights as a graffiti artist and I want up being one of the most powerful chapters in the book Step five was me writing the final chapter I got my students I reread everybody's chapter and in this case our protagonist has spent 30 days living with being a different students in the class he has a newfound appreciation for each of them he goes to his teacher and asks her how is it possible that he could do this and she explains it to him how this magic realism occurred and I'll leave it at that now each of the books cost three dollars and seventy two cents to produce so each of the students was able to get a book for less than 120 dollars my English department was also kind enough to buy a class set for me which I was able to use as a you know as a model for my future books many of the students use the fact that they'd co-authored a novel with in their college essays we put all of the royalties into a college our ship fun so I didn't make any profit any it is and also I'm happy to tell you that we won the 2013 Chicago Writers Association Award for a non-traditional literature also as a cop as a consequence of u.s. copyright law my 573 co-authors and I are inextricably bound for the rest of my life and for 75 years after that so what's next well I've got two more novels coming out with my students in June of 2016 also I had 15 of my closest friends collaborated with on a different novel which the covers of the last slide of this presentation actually one of the 15 of my adult colleagues as a professor at this university and and also I have a friend of mine who works in the prison system and she asked if I would work with some of the female inmates and collaborate and write a novel with them and of course I said yes why not and finally are you asked invite all of you all of you to consider writing a class source novel or a crowdsource novel I invite you to do that first of all because the tools are now available for us to do that also I invite you to do this because all of you have something to share and all of you and all of us are interconnected I can't promise you big dollars if you do that or a spot on New York Times bestseller list but I will tell you that if you do write a book with your friends collaborators and you publish it the joy that you feel and the community that you create or the community that you create and the pride that you feel will bring joy to you for the rest of your life now the last thing I'm going to say is any of you do collaborate on a class source novel I would ask you to send me a copy because I would love to read it thank you very much