Last night, inspired by this journaling exercise, I had student do a five minute free write on two prompts:

1) Recall a time from your own schooling when you felt especially included, engaged, appreciated, and validated
(2) Recall a situation when you felt especially excluded, alienated, and invalidated from school

Then I invited them to share, with "thank you" being the only class response permitted. This is my vision -- to the second prompt, obviously.

They discussed the free write with their groups before they shared with the whole class, and one comment about the group dialogue was that most of the stories were about elementary school even though feelings of alienation are common in college classes. They speculated, is it easier to reflect on something when time passes and distance has been achieved?