Alice Lesnick's Resources In designing many of the prompts I
wrote, I (Alice Lesnick) have drawn on the philosophy and
practices of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard
College. Our approach refuses easy divisions between personal
and public meanings, academic and experiential knowledg. At
base, the Institute’s approach to writing to learn is based on
the premise articulated by Paul Connolly (the Institute’s
Director between 1982 and 1998) that to think is to make
language choices. Learning to think is nourished by ongoing
opportunities to write informally and in community. Inquiry is
playful. Writing is revising. Thus, the prompts I have crafted
to follow each text are deliberately odd-angled, disarming, and
playful. They are supposed to be surprising and to yield
surprising ways forward. The prompts following each selection
are presented in six categories: Writing to Read; Prompts for
Collaborative Learning; Process Writing; Writing Back; Writing
More; and Breaking Media. The purposes of each of t