Blogs

Hello, everyone! I posted my thoughts on my portion of a teach-in here: /exchange/song-ourselves but comments don't have a picture uploading option, and I was having some troubles "copying" my photos. Thus, here they are now!

Both Sarah and I agreed that we do not have linear thought processes, but in an effort to indulge in divergent thoughts we recorded a very unstructured conversation about our ecological project, which including some of the sounds we have recorded while working together. For our project we both led each other on a blindfold sound tour, and led one another to a place of our choosing while recording. I was torn because I ended up needing to cut at least 20-30 minutes from the conversation because the entire recording was over an hour long and it was just too long to listen to. When I have the opportunity I will upload the rest because I think it is an interesting conversation, but I kept what I thought was the most relevant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvwFc-6kWys

When Danielle and I first started envisioning our final project, we were both very drawn to the idea of looking at privilege. Danielle had been thinking about doing a zine on the topic of privilege, but when we discovered our mutual interest in video-making, we thought that might be another way of sharing the thoughts that have come out of our class in an accessible and fun way. We really wanted to look at how Bryn Mawr impacts and is impacted by differences in privilege and one of the places we started our search was the classroom.

In order to avoid stigmatizing a specific professor or set of students, Danielle wrote a script that we used as the basis for our fictional classroom scene. One of the things I’ve really noticed as a result of practicing silence and thinking about how much space my words take up in the classroom – as well as comparing our Bryn Mawr speaking experience with being in the Cannery – was how people’s notice of vocal space (or lack of notice) really impacts the classroom environment.

Hey guys,

For my final project I made a Prezzi presentation that will take you on a virtual tour of the Bryn Mawr campus via everyone's observation sites. The tour moves cylclically through campus, beginning on the outer edges of the campus and resolving right in the center. However, feel free to move about it in any directino and order you wish. This is meant to be my personal interpretation of the campus and the semester, but that does not mean you have to limit yourself to my view. 

At each location on the map, I have included one of the images each class memeber used to visualize their sites to the rest of us, as well as two photos I took. One is from very far away from the spot, and the other is much closer. I would sit in each spot until I found a shot I could take that i believed captured an element of this specific location that had previously been unseen. By doing this, I hope I challange your preconcepts of the observations spots we've come to know so well this semester.

Here's the link to the Prezzi. Please view before continuing to read!

http://prezi.com/icqirmisr55c/prezi-5/?auth_key=1aea080f0b2503e21471c3aeaa22e72b078be2f3&kw=view-icqirmisr55c&rc=ref-27566299

For our final teach-in, I played Blue Mind, by Alexi Murdoch. Rather than focussing specifically on the content that interested me in this course, I wanted to demonstrate how my own learning process has developed.

I think the lyrics of this song compliment my personal trajectory  really well. The first stanza is somewhat vague - what does it mean? no time? sleeping? I feel some confusion (though calm) when thinking about these lyrics. At the start of the semester, it seemed as though we were trying out a lot of different things, and just getting immersed in the content. I struggled with that immersion. 

In the second stanza ("go free of time") - This represents the moments in class when I started to let go, let learning happen or not happen. I had to hibernate, gel, that sort of thing - I had to stop trying to control the outcome, something that I am still struggling with. 

The chorus, "slowly slowly I am drifting," keeps coming back to me. In class, I felt as though I was drifting at times, and I could do this either by choice or by need. I want to choose to drift, especially if it's going to happen anyway. This feels a lot like "wandering" to me - 

When do you need a guide? When do you guide yourself?

My "guides" are available online in magazine formatting at: http://jil.st/vVZTyB

If you'd like to download some of the images, they are available in this dropbox folder: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/sstmzd4b742lmeg/-Ctwt0BuxR  (it might be easier to view them this way?)

The exact origins of the dream catcher are unclear due to the destruction of oral Native American tradition by white settlers, but it seems that the dream catcher originated with the Ojibwe people, who refer to themselves as Anishnabe, meaning “first people.” As the most powerful tribe in the Great Lakes region, heir territory covered what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ontario, and Manitoba.

The Story of the Dream Catcher

Sarahj and I met to discuss our interest in sound. We met for a while, and finally decided that we would structure a discussion around the idea of creating an auditory map of Bryn Mawr. We wanted to find differing ways to represent the world and the places we inhabit, with the understanding that in Anne’s words, all representations would be “thin and inadequate” and with the assumption that in whatever representation is produced, there will always be something lost in the final product. We wanted the class to both create this map and listen to sounds of Bryn Mawr. The presentation began with us explaining our individual interests in sound and then asking the class to contribute in trying to recreate different sounds that we hear across campus. Our peers were either allowed to describe the sounds, or attempt to represent them any way they choose as long as it was through making some kind of noise. Sarahj and I agreed ahead of time that we wanted to document this map in someway. We decided that we would record these sounds that students make, in an effort to keep the representation an entirely auditory one, and not have the visual of writing on the board or on paper. In addition, we realized that if students chose to represent a sound in a way that was not descriptive, it would be almost impossible to recreate this in writing/visually. We then played a recording of a spot on Bryn Mawr’s campus and asked students to try and figure out where the sound had come from. We originally recorded two places to share, but in the interest of time, where only able to play one sound.

            In  the last couple weeks I have put a lot of thought into how we can teach our class, the student body of the Tri-College Consortium, and society in general to be more ecologically aware of the environment. I have spent most of my time talking about this in my last couple of web papers. In Hurricane Sandy, the Rotunda, and Thomas Berry, I contemplated our class’ reading of Thomas Berry and his idea of restructuring college level education to prioritize awareness of the natural world. Having felt a close proximity with nature while standing in the Haverford KINSC rotunda during a blackout, I concluded that having unplanned real world experiences like this outside of the classroom would be very useful for increasing environmental awareness. As Berry stresses how the entire system needs to be reworked, I started to wonder how his reforms for environmental-awareness education could be implemented for the best results. This came in the form of my next paper, Ecologically Reworking American Politics and Its Dynamics, where I tried to merge Berry’s proposal of a complete educational overhaul and my own idea real-world experiential education. Using Haverford College as a template, I proposed making every student take an environmental studies course as a graduation requirement so as to try and make all of the student body ecologically aware in some form or another.

Sunrise behind the bars!