Recently, the university professor Viviana Rosa Vásquez Mejía, attached to the Department of Pedagogy of the Popular University of Cesar, invited me to participate in a literary meeting with a group of her students from the subject of oral and written expression.
The educator, who has a degree in Spanish and communication from the Universidad Norte de Santander and a master’s degree in communication sciences from the Universidad Belloso Chacín, organized the event with the students, at the ‘Miguel Ángel Vargas Zapata’ newspaper library, Sabanas headquarters.
The honorable invitation was to auscultate and be a jury of 39 short stories written by the same number of Business Administration students. Of which three were in the grand final, with great writing content.
According to the Master in Spanish and Latin American Literature, Catalina Arancibia Durán, “the short story is characterized by taking the premise of brevity to the extreme. They are texts that must work with the minimum possible elements. Therefore, they contain between 6 and 200 words in which a character, an action and a space-time must be distinguished.
It stands out that, although they are stories with protagonists and anecdotes, the little space with which they are told makes them based on wit, humor and irony. Thus, they propose the idea of a reader who must actively participate in the story and add their own interpretation of it.
The participants in the event at the Popular University of Cesar were very young students between 16 and 21 years old, mostly women. The teacher’s proposal seemed prodigious and very pertinent not only for them, but also for the institution and for the student community in general. She explained that everything “was born as an initiative to strengthen and motivate students in the reading and writing process in the first semester of the Business Administration degree.”
He added that fostering and keeping the flame alive in each one of the students was to preserve that forceful phrase of the Colombian Nobel Prize for Literature, Gabriel García Márquez, when he said: “The writer writes his book to explain to himself what cannot be explain”.
But how was the idea carried out? The process was carried out when the teacher generated a guide that explains everything related to the micro-story or micro-story, also starting from the life story of each one, leading it to the narration and design of the cover of each writing, as something very creative. On your part.
In the classes, details of the short story, its characteristics and its most valuable authors were explained, and progress was made in the writing of the short story. Subsequently, it was developed by part and a first draft was reached. In addition, external tutorials were carried out that allowed the writing exercise process to mature.
The teacher was guiding each student through the drafts to manuscripts and then in digital media to streamline the exercise. Also, the students joined in pairs, making contributions to mature the writing and then the appropriate evaluations were made, to end with a last consultancy in the teachers’ room, with the design of the cover of the micro-story. In the end, the best short stories prepared by: Jefferson José Ariñez, Heiner Becerra, Nayelis Correa, Luis Humberto Díaz, Lina García, Darling López, Fiamma Martínez and Juan Esteban Rojas were selected. The three finalists were: Nayelis Correa, Lina García and Heiner Becerra.
Until next week. [email protected] @tiochiro.