We Wake, We Write | a reflective portfolio of multimedia student writing at Wake Forest University

Reflecting on “An Existence as told Through Codas,” a Video Essay

We each walked into class on April Fourteenth not necessarily knowing what to expect. Some of us had been in Professor Giovanelli’s class before, but just as students evolve, so do the teaching methods of our professors. Group work, in theory, is either a student’s most dreaded experience or their most enjoyable experience; there is…

Reflecting on “Gay Pride, Rehab, and Cheerios: A Video Essay”

When we received our assigned groups, and went over the rubric for project four in class, each of us shared the collective feeling of general uneasiness. We had each worked in groups before, that aspect was nothing new, but none of us had worked together on anything this semester especially anything as big as a…

Reflecting on the Making of “The Back of Your Mind”

The essay that we chose to adapt was James’ memoir, entitled “The Back of Your Mind.” In this essay, James grapples with a breakup between him and his ex-boyfriend, Juan. In this process, he confronts his own internal struggle of being both scientific and artistic, the former trait telling him that he should have known…

Collaborative Writing on Our Autoethnography of a Youngest Child: Reflecting and Looking Forward

Our video represents Natalie’s narrative: the experience of a youngest child reflecting on the way her life has been shaped by birth order with a new perspective she’s developed as a college student. Throughout the video making process, our group strived to take scholarly pieces that explained why she felt certain ways, and how her…

Looking Inward and Reflecting on the Effects and Advantages of Left-Handedness

Adversity is something that we overcome every single day, from bouncing back from a bad grade, to finding time to do your laundry, we beat some sort of challenge each day. However, this type of adversity was different. No longer were we dependent on ourselves, but rather we became reliant on the work of…

Behind the Scenes of “Calling Nowhere Home: Third Culture Kid (an Autoethnography of Annette Barlie)”

Compared to the familiar medium of writing a paper, making a video for project four at first seemed like a daunting task. Most members of our group haven’t had a lot of experience with video composition. Making the change from working as an individual to working as a group on this project went surprisingly…

Reflecting on the Making of “Ethnic Identity of Italian Americans”

To start off Project Four we were put into groups and then given the task of selecting one of our group member’s autoethnography from Project Three to transform into a video. The goal of this project was to turn an autoethnography, from the previous project, into a video which would be interesting for our peers…

Writing “Who Am I? Quién Soy Yo?”

Upon entering this project, only one of the four members of our group had successfully collaborated with others, and we all entered with certain reservations and overall negative mindsets in the prospects of working as a group. In project four, we learned new lessons through our difficulties and successes in choosing specific rhetorical devices to…

Reflecting on the “Importance of Mindfulness”

There was one day in Professor Giovanelli’s class when she asked us who had worked in a group project before and everybody raised their hands. We all thought we knew what group projects were, but since we were all probably those over-achieving students in high school who led most of them, we didn’t really know…

Writing “College Football Fans as an In-Group”

As a group we faced many challenges coming into this project; time always seems to be the biggest constraint on our lives and it was a large factor in this project. This was the first major group project most of us have done in college. We have all done major papers and research assignments before…