Abstract
Impressing Heaven” is the title of my collection of short stories about career decisions and experience interacting in English on the part of actual young adult learners of English as a foreign language in South Korea. (See Impressing Heaven by Barbara Waldern, July 2012 Smashwords ISBN: 9781476467023). While I was first settling in Korea, I got acquainted with a few students and other young adults who liked to talk with and assist English speaking foreigners. They made such a strong impression that I remembered them and thought about our conversations over the years. I ended up writing about them, imagining their real life situations as they had confided in me, or envisioned how their lives would proceed thereafter. I interwove their narrations with my narration of my experience with them to put myself in the shoes of others. This collection thereby serves as a journalistic reflection of some of my first encounters with such students of English as well as a preservation of memories. Given the artistic approach to this work, it is not standard social science although it is a useful exploratory activity, and can be used as one tool of reflective practice in educating, understanding, or relating to a particular cultural group as an outsider. I conclude that this form of creatively written journal keeping serves reflective practice and could contribute to sound methodological and anthropological study as an additional tool of ethnographic research and pedagogical research.
Highlights
I extend my thoughts as presented in conferences and conference papers on a discovery I have made about journal writing
The subject of this paper is a discussion and further reflection of my experience writing a teacher’s journal using creative writing techniques. This time around, I will reflect further on the value of creative non-fiction writing as reflective teaching and research practice
ISBN: 9781476467023) is a collection of short stories based on real conversations with real young adult learners of English in South Korea from 2007 to 2010
Summary
I extend my thoughts as presented in conferences and conference papers on a discovery I have made about journal writing. Anyone of any occupation, can create personal journal writing just to be more aware, or to increase understanding, or solve problems such as how to interact with someone or prioritize some business or make a decision and so on This last kind of journal writing can be done systematically, and shared within a select group, such as for management purposes or therapy or exploring group processes. As well, such people can have clients write journal on an open basis or on specific topics with the agreement that a professional is going to read and review them, and perhaps offer responses, or that some clients may read to or show excerpts to each other for discussion, and so on Both as a foreign language instructor and as a former student of anthropology, I can better appreciate the implications and potential applications of creative non-fiction in social research, ethnographic study. They are situation, story, character, scenes, summaries, and expository lumps
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