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

Apparently my papers have not been quite up to par. This has been holding me back. However, even now when the course is through, I still do not know what is wrong with them as a whole. Are they uninteresting? Poorly written? These answers do not satisfy. My online posts on the other hand feel lively, free, and each sentence has special importance—none of them are space fillers, none of them are trying to meet a quota. I don’t need three pages to say something interesting, I require a few sentences.

            So then the problem is…what? Why do all my papers suck? I’ve been told that they are messy, which is fair enough; I write my papers how I think. But they are not poorly written aside from being loosely constructed. I do have a particular way of writing, and this has been successful in the past, so what can really be so different now? This has been exceedingly frustrating. I have learned to cope by excessive thinking and ruminating on the development of my ideas in my head. If this course were solely about learning to think ecologically and holistically, I’d say I’ve aced it. Just these pesky papers holding me back…

As I reflect on my experiences in this 360, I can’t help but feel like I can never articulate my feelings on the ways I’ve been learning. It was incredible being a part of this group and it was also too intense at times. But I think this 360 has been the most challenging learning experience I’ve had yet. What got me thinking about how to answer this question was when Danielle interviewed me for her video project. I found myself stumbling over what I wanted to say. As much as I’d love to share what I’ve learned in this 360 so far with other people, I don’t think I can because the experience was so personal. I can’t exactly describe the experience to other people if they weren’t in it because I wouldn’t be doing our 360 any justice. But I hope we made a good attempt at explaining our experiences through our final presentation of our 360.

I’ve come such a long way as a student and as a participant in this 360 but I still have such a long way to go. I’m finding that I have been contradicting myself a lot and that’s troublesome, but it’s the troublesome learning that comforts me because that’s what learning looks like. It makes me think of the Threshold Concepts we talk so much about in my TLI partnership. Whether it was me shakily standing up to walk over and join the fishbowl discussion to say what I was thinking without thinking it out fully or me choosing to write so personally about my experiences at home, I took risks.

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.

A few of my most favorite readings from this course include Terry Tempest Williams, Thoreau, The Lives of Animals, Nature Writing for Women (article), as well as Solnit, Laduke, Bohm, and Berry. I found these pieces to be incredibly insightful and eye-opening. I found many of the other readings to be interesting, but either not particularly intriguing or too dense. I found Waring’s essay to be a bit too dense – especially because I am not very fond of economics - and LeGuins science fiction piece to not be particularly interesting for me (I prefer nonfiction or realistic fiction). So the challenge came here then – being able to pay attention and try my best in understanding the pieces I found rather difficult or uninteresting to read. I certainly grew as a reader in this course – through the wide variety of pieces we have read from various fields, I found that I was exposed to numerous different types of writing and readings. I also was able to find a balance between noticing the sections of a reading I should pay close attention to – enough so that I had understood the main points - and those that I could skim – whereas traditionally in an academic course I used to read every passage word for word. Of course there were those pieces however (Tempest Williams, Sonit, Berry, Lives of Animals) that I could not resist reading every word.

When we first began this experiment of Ecological Imaginings, I came in with the mindset of an Environmental Science student. For me this entitled having my head filled with ideas of doom and gloom in regards towards environmental collapse and the uphill struggle environmentalists had to fight  socially and politically if they wanted to enact change. I came into the classroom then seeing the issue of the ecology in a scientific and polices-based point of view.  Over the course of the semester though, I feel as though my viewpoint and this mindset began to change so that instead of obsessing about and analyzing the environmental issues , I started to place more emphasis in my learning in the class on trying to understand the concepts that I, as an environmentalist should be protecting. Namely, these concepts are nature itself, but also my general surroundings.

            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.