The goal of this project is to celebrate the diversity of our personal (adolescent) backgrounds and of our literacy experience. Sharing our personal experiences with literacy will help us build our classroom community. Reflecting on our own and each other's literacy histories will help us understand the wide-range of experiences and world views our students will bring into our classrooms and libraries.

Our course reference book includes this engagement as a way to better understand a character in a novel (Billy Jo from Out of the Dust on page #78). This strategy invites the reader to get inside the character's head, to identify aspects of his/her thoughts and feelings and inner world while acknowledging the outside influences that shape his/her experience.

You will create an inside-outside portrait of yourself as a young adult. Use an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper. Use any medium or mixed media. Inside the portrait shape, you will represent important components of your adolescent life: including literature, activities, objects, concepts, important people and more. Outside the portrait, you will place symbols of the outside world that were relevant to your life at that time in history.

• What memories do you have about stories, books, and/or reading as an adolescent? (These memories can be from home, school, libraries, scouting, religious institutions, or other literacy places.)
• Who are the people who made a difference in your young adult literacy experiences?
• Besides books, what other media played a part in your adolescent literacy (music, TV, films...)?
• Are there specific story/book/movie titles or genres (such as poetry, science fiction, fantasy) that stand out in your recollections?
• What was happening in the world around you at that time?
  

You need not sign your portrait. We will share them and display them in chronological order (by our birthdates) in our classroom. This is my sample portrait.