You Can't Be Human All By Yourself ... Thinking Ahead to Friday's Writing Our Lives Conference - Digital Ubuntu, 2015

The 2015 WOL-Digital Ubuntu Stickers for
Participants' Notebooks

You can’t be human all by yourself, and when you have this quality – UBUNTU – you are known for your generosity. We think of ourselves far too frequently as just individuals, separated from one another, whereas you are connected and what you do affects the whole world. ~Desmond Tutu

Dear Writers, Creators, Composers, Dreamers, Poets, Visionaries, and Mavericks,

I am, because we are. I can be me because of who we are together. You matter to the writing communities of Connecticut.

Welcome to Writing Our Lives – Digital Ubuntu: We, Too, Are Connecticut and be proud of yourself – who you are in relation to the person sitting next to you, the individual on the other side of the room, and those others who couldn’t be with you today to celebrate your accomplishments. In allusion to Matt de la Peña’s young adult novel, “We are here right now” and, together, we are stronger.

Today’s event occurred because several teachers participating in an Invitational Summer Institute through the Connecticut Writing Project at Fairfield University wanted more for their classrooms – they believe students are more than test scores and deserve outlets to innovatively rethink traditional classroom boundaries. They designed writing workshops to promote ethnography, ten-minute plays, TedTalks, blogging, digital storytelling, and websites. They desired opportunity to build stronger writing communities in Connecticut and wrote to the John Legend Show Me Campaign, National Writing Project, and John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, “We can be us, digitally, because of how we compose together with 21^st century tools.”

Yes, this was a yearlong, inter-district collaboration that brought together more than 100 students from diverse backgrounds and perspectives to exchange knowledge about composing in digital spaces. Each one of you has contributed to this effort, and today we celebrate all of us as a community. We are here. We are Connecticut, too. As collaborators we deserve a standing ovation, a few finger snaps, and new seeds for Writing Our Lives in the future.

Today, I want you to get to know one another and ask questions about one another’s school. More importantly, however, I want you to recognize that you are the innovators of tomorrow and that “You gotta write! A’ight?”

And you have already written.

Thank you for your participation, contributions, and excellence. This couldn’t be possible without you.

Bryan