Narrative Collage
Project details
Class: Honors Advanced English Composition
Student: Thach (Jenny) Pham
Instructor: Laurah Norton
Institutional Assistance: CETL, Honors
Technology: WordPress, Audacity, Apple Quicktime, Nikon D7000
In Laurah Norton’s Honors Composition course, students learn “creative nonfiction” techniques to create non-linear narratives about their experiences. Thach Pham’s narrative collage gives voice to the inner monologue that many first generation minorities in America experience. The project is a fragmented narrative collage that incorporates multimodal presentations which connect the collage into one aesthetic experience. Each of the six fragments attempts to bring readers into the story by revealing to readers the author’s inner thoughts and/or surroundings either through text, images, sound recordings, or maps. Thach argues that this fragmented narrative form is truer to human nature since we remember the past as fragments that make up our whole memory. Beyond picking up some tech and media skills, she learned about attributions and creative licensing. But most importantly, Thach says that she learned that in order to write a good story, one has to write with the reader’s experience in mind.