The Vision/Mission Statement (3% or 30 points)
Your Vision/Mission Statement can take a variety of forms, but should be at least 250 words (or equivalent). For the purpose of Core II, we will work with these definitions of these two related statements:
A vision statement is a concise, bold statement that declares who you are in the matter of a specific issue or dimension of life, or in the matter of life itself. A mission statement is an expansion of the vision statement, reiterating and amplifying it to include more specific goals, plans, and practices that fulfill your vision in the present. Writing the personal vision and mission statements will provide you with an opportunity to design the context and purpose--the controlling value-- of your creative and/or scholarly activity, toward which you will devote yourself for this semester and beyond.
You will compose an initial draft of these statements during stage one of the semester, and you will revise this to include in your Prospectus (as the opening statement) at the end of the semester. In your vision and mission statements you will declare what you have at stake as a writer and researcher in the project you will be inventing in Core II. You will be working to break through into new territory (as a researcher and writer), and not just for this semester, but also for the rest of the MA program, if not for the rest of your life, and your project will serve as the structure to fulfill on the development you are seeking to accomplish.
The best vision and mission statements speak to a wide audience, calling on that audience to join the speaker in becoming a stakeholder (the narrative audience) in the future articulated therein. Stakeholders can be those who cheer from the sidelines all the way up to direct partners in the creation and delivery of the work your statements guide you to create. In any case, the narrative audience of the vision statement ought to be touched, moved, and inspired by the statement. The "possibility" articulated in such a statement should not be limited to just you; it should be big enough so that anyone reading it might envision the possibility for themselves, to be enthused about it, and even ready to take action within it.
|
From Friedrich Nietzsche's The Gay Science. Aphorism 354 (299)
Nikki Giovanni's "Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)"
Goethe's "The Holy Longing"
ee cummings