From Individual to Collective, and Sometimes Back Again

I had more trouble working on this class through Serendip than I have with any other classes I’ve used Serendip for. I think that was because most of our class postings were so personal that they were hard to comment on. Yes you can discuss someone else’s experience, but there is only so much talking back I feel you can do because even reading about experience cannot place you there the same way the author was placed there. You can read, you can learn, but it won’t ever fully be yours. I’m not sure if other people felt the same way, but I definitely saw less discussion on Serendip, and I know that I engaged in less.

Our class discussions also had their ups and downs for me. At the beginning of the semester we had a good amount of reading, and when I take the time to do the reading for a class my hope is that we will have the chance to discuss it in class, an opportunity to grow in understanding and to try on different readings that others picked up on. My first frustration was some of our attention to being outdoors. As someone unafraid of your garden variety bugs and spiders and who doesn’t mind a little chill or mist in the air, the time spent on these topic felt unbearable. I also sometimes just want to be told what to do. Our stretched out conversation about our field trip resulted in a great experience that I am so glad we undertook the challenge of setting up, but the actual in-class deciding process was another one of those discussions that seemed never-ending to me. I don’t know if I have a better alternative in mind, but the whole process seemed stressful and stretched out (that might have partially been the pressure put on us by Sandy an the frustrations over perhaps a little too fluid plans). There are a few classes that I remember being particularly silent in, out of frustration. But I hope that in the classes that I was more vocal in that I was able to share a perspective that helped to tie ideas together, particularly in terms of maybe a more scientific view of the readings and concepts presented there.

Another challenge I had with this class was the dynamic of us, especially at the beginning. It felt like most of us were not on the same page about, well, everything. I noticed a few small changes here and there, but it wasn’t probably until our trip to Ashbridge that it really hit me how far we’d come. We worked together to set up a time and space for us it seemed like we inhabited together, not just together with each other but also with our surroundings (I touched on some of this in my reflection on the dream catcher I made).

Some of my favorite readings this semester were LeGuin, LaDuke, and Tempest Williams. I also really enjoyed our assignment from October 7th where we were to re-write in a new mode, and I wish I had taken the initiative to expand on this and cover more than one mode. It helped to cement the fact that while a story retold can lose something, it can also gain- my re-written paragraph many not have said the exact same thing, but it may have touched new people in a different and perhaps moving way. I put in a great deal of thought and effort into both my web events and our field trips, and while they didn’t always accomplish what I hoped they would or end up where I thought they would, that process, while at times frustrating, was about the progress towards getting it “right.” In science something is often considered “true” if it cannot be disproven, and in this way I think I weeded out some of what doesn’t work, even if I haven’t (perhaps never will) quite gotten it “right.”

What I brought into this course was probably an ecological view more on the doom and gloom side, heavily influenced by An Inconvenient Truth. While I love being outside and I don’t spend all my time climbing trees or wading in streams thinking about the demise of the globe and life on Earth, but when I thought about ecology in the academic and scientific sense it was detached and non experiential. And in some ways that is good, because not every day will you see evidence that big small changes are building up into something big. What I gain from this course is the lesson that change cannot be initiated by a one-sided monologue based only on facts and figures that not everyone has the access to understand or fathom. At the beginning of the course we, as individual class members, were all in different places and just weren’t going anywhere. As the semester progressed and we opened ourselves up to new ideas, new ways of presenting and being presented with ideas, we didn’t lose our own individuality, but rather saw the effects that a group with a common goal can produce, even if the effects start as small ones. By telling stories and opening ourselves up for new experiences, the potential for the end of the world, and the potential for hope, we ended the start of our journey.