3 November 2010
In October, ten Jakarta international Students and I travelled to the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival in Ubud, Bali. My goals for the students were to introduce them to a community of writers, encourage their creativity, and to provide them with opportunities to practice and enhance their craft.
As part of this experience, we attended a private workshop with Zhang Su Li, a travel writer, who I hoped would help the students learn the guidelines of travel writing and spark their imaginations. With Su Li, we got so much more than we were hoping for.
Su Li had a great rapport with the students, and it took her only minutes to get their creative juices flowing. Most of them were already good writers, but her cues and activities helped them to “think outside the box” and to craft their sentences even more. Her prompts for avoiding clichés and creating details were both fun and thought-provoking and the students responded both in their writing and verbally—happily sharing their writing and criticism with the rest of the group.
I especially appreciated the ease with which Su Li was able to make the students feel comfortable with sharing their work and comments. She has a great way of avoiding self-deprecating comments which I have started to use in my classroom to great effect.
I also passed along some of her activities and worksheets to the ninth grade English teachers at JIS, and they have incorporated these activities into their Travel Writing unit. So everyone at JIS has benefited greatly from the two-hour’s time we spent with Su Li in Ubud.
One of my students, who has been going to the Festival for three years proclaimed Su Li’s workshop as “the best one ever!”, and I have to agree. In my four years of accompanying kids to Ubud, Su Li’s workshop was the most active, creative and student-centered one we have attended.
Thanks, Su Li, for everything!
Sincerely,
Wendy Grant
HS English Teacher, Jakarta International School.
