360 Self Evaluation

            I think that what perhaps shaped my work most in all aspects of the 360 was that I came into the semester not caring about my grades.  I was exhausted about putting so much pressure on GPA and transcripts, and also felt like I had gotten to a point where I had wiggle room.  This didn’t mean that I did not care about learning in the 360 – in fact I very purposely decided to take on an unnecessarily large course load because I was so excited by the class topics.  What it did mean, however, is that I broke from my normal class routine of just giving professors what I think they want. I used to always analyze my professors, figure out what kind of arguments make them tick, and then try to reproduce that.  And, usually, that worked.  This 360 was a decidedly different experience because I handed in all kinds of work without any idea of what the reaction would be.  For Barb’s class, I wrote memos (particularly my final memo) that could easily be offensive.  While I didn’t intend to offend, I did explore questions and topics that I found concerning and interesting, regardless of what I thought the response would be.  In Jody and Anne’s classes, this attitude translated into me writing about some very personal topics that I have never explored before in any other classes.  To be completely honest, before this semester, I never even thought that I would be writing about things like my family’s religion, because it just felt too risky and uncomfortable.

            I think that Barb’s class was one place where class discussion really forced me to think about how I articulate strongly-held thought and ideas.  Earlier in the semester there were some dicey moments in class when I tried to press and debate my (radical?) views on things like social welfare and drug policy.  I think that I was someone who made people think and made people uncomfortable – in both good and bad ways.  Although I always tried very hard to never silence any of my classmates, and to debate and discuss, rather than lecture, I worry that my forcefulness might have been too much.  For me, part of why the class made me so animated was that I felt like I was finally starting to be able to verbalize ideas that I’d only talked about before with like-minded people.  This was especially true in some of our small group activities, like when we were policymakers or had to draw our stereotype of a criminal.  When I went canvassing with YASP at Temple a couple weeks ago, we ran into a group of young, white, women who I presume were students there.  After giving them our handouts and explaining Act 33, they reacted by not only refusing to sign the petition, but telling us how terrible it was for us to not want to “lock up teenage murderers and rapists” – and that we were contributing to societal harm.  It was really great to be able to calmly and respectfully tear their argument apart, and I very much think that my experience earlier in the semester contributed to my ability to do that.

            Another part of what helped me to articulate those ideas was the reading that we had in Vision class during the first half of the semester. Texts like The New Jim Crow and Colored Amazons gave me the arguments and words to talk about ideas that I already agreed with.  I think that because of this, I really tried to engage deeply with the readings, and figure out how I could borrow language to bring into other aspects of my life.  I did all the reading for this first part of the class very carefully.  I think that these early texts very much influenced my later memos, even though I didn’t necessarily reference them: thinking about institutionalized racism and racialized incarceration became the lens through which I asked all of the questions in my memos and brought with me when our class went into the Cannery.

            My memos for the class were exciting because there was so much overlap between a lot of the issues I was exploring and what I see at my job, “in practice.”  I also really liked the fact that I was allowed to choose any topic I wanted, which I think forced me to really think about what I was most interested in exploring.  Although I’m proud of all three of my memos, my last memo allowed me to write about a concern that I don’t necessarily think is politically correct: what does it mean to have a theory of justice that stems from religious teachings and scripture?  This is a question I’ve asked myself many times when learning about topics like Just War Theory, and I’m really glad that I was able to explore and analyze the question in an academic (versus gut reaction) way. 

            In many ways, my experiences in Vision class often carried over into Voice class.  I saw myself feeling like I wanted to rigorously debate a lot of the issues I felt strongly about from Vision reading, such as the reason funding for prison education should not be talked about using language of “deserving” or “undeserving.”  I also have a lot of the same concerns about unintentionally silencing my classmates – and even though I know that I didn’t mean to, I still do not know what the actual effect of my words were.  I think that I was most able to thrive in some of the unconventional discussion activities we did, including the silent discussion about Dewey, the rotating group discussion, and the two activities where we had to create lesson plans.  I often felt like I alternated between feeling like I was talking too much and feeling like I had nothing important to say, and these different modes of discussion and dialogue were very helpful in letting go of those concerns.

            Although I enjoyed all of the reading for the class, I often found myself not as engaged while reading Girl Time and Reading is My Window.   I thought the programs and ideas we were reading about were important, but I had a hard time figuring out how to link the books to some of the more radical education theory we’d read earlier in the semester.  When we were asked to do a barometer activity for Girl Time I found myself frustrated because even though I understand how what we read connects to larger topics, I felt like we were spending too much time discussing the intricacies of one particular program, without looking at it in a broader context.  Looking back, I wish that I had tried to widen the discussion, but at the time it didn’t really feel possible.  When we did talk about some of the broader themes, such as during the beginning of the semester and with the readings attached to our Bryn Mawr research projects, I thought that I was able to make a lot of links during in-class dialogue, and I enjoyed doing that.

            For some reason my first two writing assignment seem like they are from a very long time ago, but I feel good about both of them.  When I wrote about Freire’s idea of dialogical education it was very exciting to be able to question long-held notions of academia, and feel safe doing so.  What does it mean when a professor tells a class that there is an average grade, and everyone will probably fall along that curve?  Is a system based on competition really conducive to the kinds of societal change I think are important?  Exploring this was both a way for me to tackle new material that I found very stimulating, and reflect back on what I think works or doesn’t work about our current educational model, and what I think could be possible (for education and for society).  I probably worked the hardest on my second paper, because I was talking about somebody else, and for that reason I felt like I had to be very careful and purposeful with what I wrote.  Although in retrospect some of my phrases were problematic (“second grade reading level”) I think that I did get across a lot of the connections I was making with our literacy readings and class discussion.  When I started writing my third paper for the class, I was in a pretty uneasy emotional state: I had just been told that I should change my research focus because absolutely no information was available on my chosen topic.  I think that I ended up doing a pretty good job funneling my anger and perplexity into finding as much material as I could on Jewish history at Bryn Mawr.  As I was writing the paper, I almost wished that I was writing a thesis, because it seemed like there was still so much information left uncovered.  It was also both nice and uncomfortable to write about something that I knew I had a personal connection with.

            I also wrote about personal topics during Silence class, but often felt like my lack of personal experience made me less able to contribute to class discussion.  Although I actively engaged in our discussion about our various readings, I sometimes felt uncomfortable offering my opinion on the topics we were talking about, because I didn’t have any personal experience to draw from.  I am very much a believer that the personal is political, but sometimes it felt like my political/analytical ideas were less valuable because I couldn’t speak from a place of personal awareness.  Nonetheless, I very much enjoyed the deep discussion we were able to have over the course of the semester, even if it was sometimes uncomfortable.  Our fishbowl discussion early in the fall, when ishin discussed my comment to one of her posts, was the first time someone has confronted me about feeling offended by my writing.  I appreciated that there was a forum for such critical feedback, and felt good that I could then respond.  I often left class feeling emotionally drained and exhausted – whether I had spoken a lot or not at all – and think that is a testament to the complexity of my participation. 

            My one big regret is that I had to miss both of the class discussions on Eva’s Man (after my roommate attempted suicide in the early morning, and then to get a ride to spend Thanksgiving with my family – neither of which I had control over), because I had so many questions about the book and wanted to hear the reaction of my classmates.  It felt a little lonely to read the book and then not talk to anyone about it.  For the rest of the semester, though, my opinion/interest/ideas on the readings ended up shifting based on what the rest of the class was saying.  For instance, when reading Beckett I was a little confused when trying to think about the message he was trying to get across in through the play, but I didn’t think about the piece in terms of who has access to its meaning.  After our class discussion I had to confront the idea that postmodern literature can at the same time be liberating for an author and certain audiences, while still being restrictive and inaccessible to others.  Similarly, I read I, Rigoberta Menchu from a very text-based analytical perspective, and didn’t think about the question of its purpose until it was raised in class.  I really did try to do as much analysis inside my head after I did all of the readings for silence class, but I generally found that my lasting opinions were formed by the rest of my classmates.

            My second web event tried to explore some of the issues related to personal story-telling in class that we were experiencing in real time.  Together with my first web event, I think that it pushed me to write down ideas that I might have otherwise left floating in my head, but it didn’t necessarily push me academically.  Writing two subsequent web events that were more “creative” allowed me the space to play a lot more than I would have otherwise.  As a child I used to write scripts all the time (I loved playing with dolls, but it was never spontaneous – I always wrote a script first), but I hadn’t tried writing one for over fifteen years.  I enjoyed the creative challenge, and also think that I was able to write about an issue so personal (silences in the Jewish community) because I was using a less restrictive medium.  Similarly, my final haiku was a lot of fun because I was able to figure out a way to be creative and not write a typical essay while at the same time offering a close reading of a text.  I usually shy away from poetry, but playing around with Jones’ own words gave me a really interesting way to piece together a poem.

            Surpirsingly, I had a very different reaction to the poetry we did in the Cannery.  It felt forced and fake, and, like with some of our other art projects, I found myself slowly mentally disengaging.  I went into the Cannery not knowing what to expect, but with little worry about what would take place.  Although some obvious concerns (will it be awkward?  will it be dangerous?)  did turn out to be unfounded, it hadn’t even occurred to me that art could feel so stifling.  What I think turned me off the most was that our projects were so prescribed that there was often little room for reinterpretation or imagination.  For instance, when we did the activity where we each wrote down one time we helped someone else, and then read it to a small group, one of my partners was chastised for telling her story to us rather than reading it.  I immediately shut down.  What was the point of this art, and why did it need to be so controlled?  To be honest, I don’t think that I engaged in the art creation process nearly as much as I could have or probably should have.  Perhaps because I was already feeling so uncomfortable, I rarely felt the desire to talk during our group discussions – even when, in retrospect, there were moments when I could have said something insightful, or made ties to ideas like racism and the school-to-prison pipeline, which I wish we had talked about more in the Cannery.

            Despite this, I pushed myself to initiate a lot of one-on-one conversations, and ended up learning a lot from these more intimate encounters.  Almost every week I found myself having a serious conversation with a different woman from the Cannery, and enjoyed the opportunity to talk about things outside of the themes induced by our art projects.  While I didn’t explicitly name a lot of the themes from the first half of the semester, a lot of my one-on-one dialogue touched on related issues.  And while the art itself didn’t necessarily engage me, the discussion that came out of shared frustration with the art was often really powerful and generative.  For instance, some women I talked to really appreciated being able to create something tangible, but felt constrained by the actual process – which led to conversation about what it means to have outside forces controlling your movement, and how this occurs even outside of a prison setting.  I also really appreciated having Howard Zehr join our class, and was glad to have his ideas as a conversation-starter.  Not surprisingly, I think that my preparation and reflection on the experience focused more on interpersonal dialogue than art creation.  I tried to connect the readings with the conversations I was actually having, not the topics that the art tried to guide us towards. 

            I’m proud of my participation in the 360, because I really do feel like I had many moments of learning for the sake of learning – not credits, or a grade, or a requirement, or to make my transcript look good, etc., etc.  I think that I definitely could have tried to dig deeper with some of the readings, or been more meaningful in class discussion, or push myself even further with my writing.  Nonetheless, I think that my overall output very much reflected by state of mind coming into the class.  I also think that I am better positioned going forward to take part in a lot of different work and discussions that are important to me.  Activist work that I was already involved with has been enriched by things I learned in the 360, and arguments I make in conversation are strengthened by some of the text we’ve read.  I didn’t expect this cluster of courses to have any kind of translatable application beyond this semester, so I’m glad that I’m already starting to make connections to the outside world.