Self Evaluation

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.

I know I wasn’t the most vocal participant and sometimes I can’t help but feel as if my silence will be what hurts me the most when I’m in a classroom on this campus. Sometimes I just have nothing to say because my peers have already beaten me to the punch or sometimes I do it out of habit. But it wasn’t until I posted on Serendip for the day I was absent from Anne’s class that I felt the need to speak up using the website. I’m tired of feeling bad for simply being myself. I don’t want to have to feel like I need to speak for the sake of hearing my voice or to do it just for a grade. And then I struggle even more because I know that vocal participation is something that is so valued in Western society and I’ve got to work with this system if I’m going to succeed in it. Speaking up is highly valued in this type of community. At the end of the day I’m in a college classroom and I need to get the grade, so I have to speak up. I don’t want to, but it’s what I need to learn to do if I’m going to succeed. I prefer to speak when I can offer an original thought that has been satisfactorily processed. When I speak, I want you to truly hear me, and hopefully what I have to say will be important and useful to the conversation.

I can never be thankful enough for having Erin and Hayley in our 360 because I used them as a way to measure how quiet we were so we could figure out when to say something. When Hayley managed to get in on the conversation, I felt comfortable enough to say something. If both of them hadn’t opened their mouths once during class, then I knew it was just going to be a bad/quiet day on our part. They were the people I could talk to about our silence. I just felt like they were my support system in a very vocal classroom environment.

But besides my own problems concerning silence and how it affects my work, I get really worried when I think about how I may have - or have not - contributed to my peers’ learning. One time, it was brought up to me by another student that it was disappointing that I wasn’t speaking up in class, and that it wasn’t exactly contributing to her learning experience. That really bothered me. I had no idea that my silence in class could hurt someone else’s learning experience. I always saw too vocal students as an inconvenience to my learning because they’re shutting out other voices in the conversation. I’d never realized that what I was doing wasn’t much too different. I was shutting myself out of the conversation. I’m still not sure where I stand on this issue. It’s not like I will become the greatest public speaker overnight. I will always make it my goal to speak up in class, but I will also stick by my reasons for keeping silent when I find it necessary.

I really enjoyed reading “I, Rigoberta Menchu” because it was a reading that I felt I could relate to (but not really, because Doris Sommer said I should be careful of making experiences universal)! The trauma novels always made me feel heavy afterwards but I thought it worked with what we were discussing in our 360. I liked “Right to be Hostile” because I’d never really thought about how anger is viewed as an illegitimate emotion in institutional spaces. I think I was somewhat aware of that issue but what the text did was it provided the vocabulary for what I was noticing in the world around me. The book I enjoyed the most from Barb’s class was “The New Jim Crow” because I had never thought of mass incarceration as another form of slavery – the book was mind-blowing! All of these books made me open my eyes a little wider and think more critically about the issues at hand. They forced me to take the next steps mentally. Instead of just observing these things and going about my day, I now understood them at a more analytical level and felt empowered to do something about it.

Much of my writing on Serendip was stand-alone. I won’t lie, I mainly posted because I was required to. I just felt like Serendip was an inconvenience at first, especially when we were expected to post so frequently for each class. My initial dislike for Serendip faded away when the required postings slowed down a bit. That way I felt like I had more time and freedom to actually check out the online conversation. The classes where we picked out bits of conversations to use as a way to spark a discussion was an incredibly helpful technique. I would leave the discussion wanting to check out Serendip to see where the conversation would go. I definitely wish I had used it as a way to say what I was thinking in class but never said, but I was always afraid that no one would read it.

I spent a lot of time wondering how my written work was understood by all three professors in this 360. I found it particularly hard in Anne’s web event assignments to figure out if my written work was improving. Those papers startled me the most because I felt like they were so relevant to my experiences at home and I never expected to write so personally. I felt vulnerable and sometimes I would post privately. Sometimes I would hope that my classmates wouldn’t read my paper. It was weird not wanting my classmates to read my stories – it was like I didn’t trust them, but I still chose to share. These papers were the ones that also felt most incomplete. These papers became spaces that I felt I could use to speak up. In Jody’s class assignments, I wasn’t really sure of my writing, until she told me that she was seeing an improvement! I still don’t know why it’s gotten better though – I figured I could only get better as a writer than I was in our E-Sem!

In Barb’s class, I had trouble journaling. Of course, I was observing what was going on in the Cannery but I didn’t feel compelled to write about my feelings because I needed to process. I regret not consistently journaling and I should’ve done a better job of doing that. The memos were always so difficult for me and maybe it was because I’ve never had Barb as a professor before and I wasn’t sure what she expected from me. I think the fact that a memo needed to be journal entries and academic texts meshed together is what made me nervous, which is something I should’ve been used to by now - it was like a research paper! I just haven’t heard the term “research paper” in over a year and I was feeling rusty. The last memo was incredibly difficult to write because I just didn’t know what to do with myself. I was so overwhelmed with my thought process and yet so frustrated that I felt helpless despite all the things that I had learned in this past semester.

I do want to go back and rethink how I talked about group projects during our debrief. I was feeling frazzled from all the other group projects I had in other classes and I really needed to say that it was overwhelming. Despite my frustrations with the group projects, I always had some fun and I was deeply satisfied with our final projects. I think what Anne said during our debrief was really important and true – relying on others puts us in a vulnerable position. It’s scary to have to rely on each other and I definitely felt scared at times. Though our hard work always paid off, I still stick by my feelings of frustration and worry. When has a group project not been frustrating?

I think I did a good job of stepping outside my comfort zone by going to the Cannery to have class, and also just by being in this 360! One of my favorite memories in the Cannery was creating poems and our collages and particularly my conversation with one of the youngest women in the Cannery. She was really nice and we bonded over how much we missed our families and our moms’ cooking! At the beginning of the semester, I was scared because I had my own assumptions, but after all the discussions in Barb’s class I felt there was no reason to be nervous. And all the women were so funny – they made it hard not to relax and laugh along with them!

The art portion of our prison class was incredibly helpful at times because it allowed me to play. I didn’t have to play the role of a stressed out college student – I was just a girl creating a collage. Because of this calming art class and Anne’s silence activities, I’ve actively tried to incorporate more enjoyable and silent activities and I’ve taken up drawing again! I think when the concept of “play” was brought up in Jody’s class, it became a huge turning point for me. I was so disappointed that I wasn’t enjoying myself. I was always working and studying and stressing out. When was the last time I played? This was all timed so perfectly – I learned the importance of using silence as a way to reflect and using art as a form of play.

To answer the question of where I am as a learner – I’ve learned so much and stepped out of my comfort zone plenty of times. But I will never be able to pinpoint exactly where I am because I know I will always have a long way to go. I’m armed with all this knowledge and I want to do something about it, but I also realize that I don’t have to go about solving the world’s problems alone. Sometimes it’s best to sit and think it through. This 360 was an incredible experience and has helped me question and understand the value of a liberal arts education. I truly will miss being a part of such a wonderful, thoughtful, social justice-loving group of people.