When I first started this class, I wasn’t sure at all what to expect. I was excited. I’d worked with Anne and Jody before and I’d met and interacted with a number of people in the class in a variety of contexts. In fact, when I saw the list of people in the class, I thought: “This is going to be an amazing semester.” The people in the 360 really do build the experience, and my expectations in terms of what my classmates and my professors would bring were not disappointed.

Because of this sense of familiarity, I’ve taken a lot of risks this semester. I’ve begun to understand and come to terms with my position of privilege and also come to understand the places where I am less privileged or de-privileged. I wrote my first web-paper for Anne about how I couldn’t write about my original place of silencing because the venue for my writing was a public one. Two papers later, I was able to address the topic in the form of a graphic narrative, and now by the end of the semester, I’ve built up the courage to speak to my parents about my position. I’ve also been able to really question myself within the space of the classroom– something I’ve shied away from before because of how vulnerable making it can be.

I want to get
older with you
read in
bed with you
every night
like tonight
we've got
time but
that bright star
looking through
our dark window
the reflection
more beautiful
than this what
happens when
the water's too
tired to clean
our human shores
the air too
thick to see
stars caught in
fall trees'
capillaries
choking
well I'll be
listening
to your
tender breath 
I'll be more
steadfast than
that nightlight 
sleep sound to
your soft fall
and swell
dreaming of 
waking with
you of
waking
with you. 

We're old
enough to know
we're young,
this winter's snow
shining far as
we can see
which isn't far
but sure is
beautiful.
Nothing is
as pure as this 
and it isn't.
However we walk
soft this solstice 
through our mother's
bare forests
whiter than our
mind before dreams.  
The sky darkens
early and our
parents sleep.
I hold your
hand and
we go bravely
into that
sweetness. 

I started at a pretty bad place. I did not even realize how little time I spend with nature and think ecologically until I attended Ecological Imaginings course. In choosing an on campus site, I was the only person in class to adopt an indoor site and intended to observe nature from afar through the window, which I later learned in Terry Tempest Williams book, is an unnatural thing to do. Since I had little memory of nature and was not used to ecological thinking, I even compared the natural scenery of the night sky with the scenes from man-made films. Worse still, as an international student whose first language is not English, I was overwhelmed by the readings and had a difficult time fully expressing myself in my essays. On top of these, I was also dealing with culture differences (that my essay is always not explicit enough), my procrastination and my homesickness.

I could talk little about the first few readings, not because I did not read them carefully because they are talking about those new ideas that were higher than my normal thinking horizon, for example Bohm confused me by comparing the usual method writing with quantum, because I think writing and physics are incomparable at that time. I could only turn in a somewhat beginning of a paper for my first paper, simply because I did not have the confidence to write a paper at that time. Nor have I been used to setting time to sitting alone on  grass thinking how dependable human are of plants and other ideas or refelctions.

I had a very happy time preparing the Teach-in with Barbara and Shengjia. I borrowed some book from Swat library so that we could find some good supporting materials about the Sky Burial Process. I focused on the cultural background of Sky Burial and found that Sky Burial, for Tibetan people, was not only a way for "gainning better rebirth", but also an important ceremony for worship nature.

I was impressed by the wisdom and reasoning behind Sky Burial. People made a non-profit "fair trade" with natural world to well balance their survival and belief, and I think their effort, however controversial in legal perspective, should really be appreciated and respected.

Also, I learnt many things from my Teach-in partners, Barbara and Shengjia. Barbara was really good at showing and describing the Sky Burial process, and Shengjia perfectly joinned parts of components together--from sites on school to "journey to Tibet".

I think Teach-in is a very good activity at the end of semester. Because of the Teach-in, I had the chance to work with my friend and provide my classmates more information on an interesting topic related with what we have learnt this semester.

            My group’s final project was a workshop that touched on different types of oppression and ways in which different groups are silenced on campus. We explore voice and Jody’s by educating people on the different ways in which privilege appears on campus. We used the discussion-based way of teaching/learning in our workshop. We explore the notion of vision and Barbs class by making the participants think about their niches on campus and where it is that they feel comfortable and where they do not. We used silence in our workshop by having silent discussions and giving people time to reflect on what they have seen on the posters before commenting. We also had a Delpit way of “teaching”. Throughout most of the workshop (i.e. cross the line activity) our point would get across depending on how the participants interpreted the activity. Throughout that activity, we included questions that touched on religion, gender and sexuality and race with the hopes that the participants would make the connections themselves.

            When I first heard of this 360 and the topic, I got so excited and could not wait to be apart of it even if we were not traveling outside of the country like the other 360 classes did. Once the classes began I realized it was going to be an intense semester because I realized how many different point of views everyone had and I noticed this huge learning gap between my peers and I. I really found the “tension” we had in class at the beginning to be really interested. Even though I am aware that I have experienced these learning gaps between my peers and I in other class, it was really different in our 360. This was the first time I had conversations about it in class with my classmates. When it came to speaking of these issues I would usually just vent with my friends outside of classes. I really loved the fact that as the semester continued, we became more and more willing, or able to, speak of these privileges with one another. This has been an experience that I will never forget, I really loved the fact that the professors became so willing to give us the space to work on an activist project as part of the class.

Initially when I was discussing writing my reflection with Anne, she suggested that I write one for both the 360 and Ecological Imaginings because so many of my connections in both classes were deeply intertwined with one another. I ultimately decided against this because I wanted to give both classes distance from one another because there are many ways in which I also see the points at which they do not intersect. However, it was not until I was looking over my posts on Serendip to do my reflections that I could really visually see the ways in which the 360 course cluster and my Ecolit class overlapped. Many of my connections to Ecological Imaginings were finding the ways in which the Environment movement is racially and class exclusive, something I had never realized or encountered before. My concept of the way nature affects people significantly influenced how I perceived the Prison environment. One of the other connections I began to make toward the end of the course was between Jody’s education course and Ecolit revolved around divergent thinking and “play.” I began to wonder if the ways in which we are taught to focus in school, and filter out divergent thoughts was not ecologically friendly because we are taught to filter out of the “distracting” environment as well.