Reflection on our final project: space and education on campus.

This project was very significant in that it allowed us to explore a subject that we had all struggled with – finding a place on campus and how we fit into the collective Bryn Mawr space. Of course, the problem with exploring seems to be that we came up with many, many ideas – too many to be presented in one short video. So while this video certainly does not represent all of those complex ideas and issues regarding space on campus, I think it does represent our most coherent stream of ideas. The video begins with a few dictionary definitions of words that we associated with space on campus: space, structure, class, education, and home. We thought it was important to apply some technical terms to the words that we have been using for this entire semester, and we hoped that these definitions would serve as reminders for the rest of the video.

We then examined the way that M. Carey Thomas viewed Bryn Mawr because we thought it was important to analyze the principals that this campus was founded on, as it is these exact principals that got us thinking about where we fit into this campus. We used color coding as we drew on a map of Bryn Mawr, to represent those terms that we defined in the beginning of the video; the most interesting of these color coded images, to me, is the big blue circle we drew that encompasses the campus, where blue represents class.

We then proceeded to ask other students to define Bryn Mawr as we felt it was important to see how students who had not taken this E-Sem course felt about Bryn Mawr. Their responses were, in fact, somewhat similar to our own. We then proceeded to define our own feelings about space on campus on that same map of Bryn Mawr. This part of our project was, and still feels, rather complex to me, as it seems to summarize both our good feelings towards and objections to Bryn Mawr. In a way, it was really very cathartic to do this activity though, as it helped me, personally, define my own space on Bryn Mawr’s campus – something I have been struggling with for quite some time.

We ended our presentation with the simple, yet very complex question of, “How do you define Bryn Mawr?” We thought this question was important to ask because we wanted to stretch beyond the realm of exploring our personal definitions and feelings towards Bryn Mawr, and rather encourage others to contemplate their own definitions of Bryn Mawr. Interwoven within question, is the contemplation of the ideas of space, defining one’s own space on campus, and defining one’s feelings about Bryn Mawr.