December 18, 2014 - 13:20
Anne,
As I said to you in our last conference, I feel like it took me a while to get the hang of this class, not because of the reading difficulty or the workload, but because of understanding what was expected of me.
Truthfully, coming into this class, I had no idea what to expect. I had no idea what you expected of us, I had no idea you could just call professors by their first names, and I had no idea what we would be talking about.
Right off the bat I decided I was interested in the discussions; I remember you telling me to hold back and let other people talk, and I feel like that was one of the strange ways this class helped me grow, and to really get a sense of others opinions and let their voices be heard.
Actually, that’s something this class has made me very conscious of: voice. Who has a voice, who doesn’t, what opinions are being voiced, what biases we have to cut through to find a deeper understanding of the world we live in… I think that was one of the challenges of this course: seeing all the inequalities of voice, and all of the people who couldn’t get a word in, and not feeling like there was anything I could do about it. I feel like the Ferguson verdict was very timely for us; it brought to mind June Jordan and Minnie Bruce Pratt, struggles of Race without true answers, and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, also a huge question that I can’t find answer to.
My whole life I’ve struggled with this grayness of having no answer within reach; I’ve spent so much time researching, or trying to define the undefinable, and here again I was faced with something similar: trying to answer something tangled in a web of complexities.
So hearing the voices helped. Hearing a variety of perspectives from a diverse pool of authors helped. Listening to my classmates who come from all over the world helped. Because this helped me, I tried to keep my voice genuine both in class online discussions. I like to get it all out through words. Sometimes my posts are rather poetic, sometimes they’re analytical, but they’re as true to as I feel as I can be. I’ve written myself to understanding many times, and there is not an exception within the context of this class. Despite this, of course, this course has reiterated the fact that, though I may find stream-of-conscious monologue to be honest, it may not be the most cohesive or comprehensible for a larger audience. This class opened up the pressures of a larger audience reading my raw work, which was both refreshing and frustrating. I’m much more comfortable when I’ve picked through the pieces of something, despite the fact that I love writing candidly.
The 10-Week Project was something I could pick through. Something I had the time to mill over, and had I had more time to present it, I assure you that I would have kept sifting. Sydney was really great to work with. She offered great ideas, but was also very willing to listen. She was tolerant of my weird color-coding things because she is generally just a very chill person, and I think our group dynamic really made this project possible. We divided the research for all of the texts we read in each of our classes, and spent hours plugging names, dates, and university names into Excel spreadsheets, then we took the data we thought was most interesting and provocative, and we presented it.
After our presentation of the data we found it was clear that there was a very select voice we were hearing from our studies, the variety I craved, that I struggled for, wasn’t there. And so I began to question why this could be. Why there was great a voice was given to such a vast number of people with so close to the same upbringings and opinions. I want to search for this voice; I crave this elusive understanding of those people who aren’t highly published, who may not have a Doctorate, but still have something to say. I think I will be searching for that voice for my entire life, but I don’t think that there can ever be enough of it. We’re so saturated with sameness, I want perspective. I want to take an idea, place it on a pedestal and fire shots at it from all angles. Attack, in the sense that it’s clear these voices I’m seeking aren’t going to be handed to me. There are so many fights going on in this world as we speak, so many struggles, and this is just one.
It’s just another question without an answer, but there is a journey that can be made, to understand this world better.
Leigh