Reply to comment

Looking back on my senior year as a whole, things have preceded much differently than I initially expected. I was hoping to do a Sociology thesis, but due to a number of factors, it did not work out. This left me scrambling at the end of last semester, trying to figure out what two classes I would take in lieu of the thesis. Jody brought my attention to the Eco-Literacy 360 cluster and at the very last minute I signed up for it. I was a little bit nervous about taking on the 360—at the beginning of the semester, I would have had to take on five classes, which in addition to applying for jobs, and as a second semester senior, I was not interested in doing. Luckily, I had the support of all of the 360 Professors and my Major Advisor in finding a way to make my schedule less demanding and more manageable. With the permission of my Major Advisor, I was able to drop one of my courses and audit it, allowing me to more fully engage in the 360. I am so happy that this situation worked out; diffracting on this experience, I see how much I have grown and have been challenged across different parts of my academic and social life.

Through this semester, I feel that I have contributed in many ways to the in-class discussion as well as the ongoing online conversation on Serendip. I feel that throughout the semester I have become more forthcoming in my comments and contributions that I made in the class, though I do feel that I could--and should have spoken up more. I also utilized Serendip in many ways, which was a new and interesting experience for me. While I contributed to the online conversation frequently, most of the times it was assigned of me and I wish I had gone beyond this to contribute to the online eco-system more than I did. I do not know if there is an exact way of measuring how much I contributed to the learning of my classmates, but I do hope that I did. This semester, I really wanted to focus on “listening people into existence”. Sometimes, I get so consumed with what I am going to say in a discussion that I neglect to truly hear what other people are saying. I wanted to hone in on this and become more mindful and present in conversations I was engaged in. I know that I did get better at listening to what other people said, which helped me learn and grow significantly. I still need to work on the balance of how much I should talk and listen though, as I felt that there were times this semester where I did not insert my comments enough into the class discussion.  

For the most part, I enjoyed all of the readings, and found them helpful in bringing together the different disciplines. Freire’s “The Importance of the Act of Reading” was a wonderful text to begin the Eco-Literacy journey—it helped us to tie together our readings of the world—ecological issues and the field trips—with our readings of the word. I enjoyed reading most of the Education and English texts. I had a more difficult time engaging with the Economics texts, but a reading that really struck me was the “Global Warming Would Harm the Earth, but Some Areas Might Find it Beneficial”. Up until this point, I felt that the Working with Economic Data course was more siloed from the English and Education courses. However, this reading demonstrated how important Economics is in the Eco-Literacy conversation. One reading from English that was challenging for me to access was LeGuin’s “Vaster than Empires and More Slow”. Even after re-reading this text following our class discussion, I couldn’t seem to grasp the story or connect with the characters, so this is one learning edge I identified.

I would consider most of the web events/papers I wrote on Serendip to be “stand alone” pieces of writing. Serendip was a new space and outlet for me that I feel I didn’t quite use to its fullest, richest extent. Since most written work I have produced at Bryn Mawr is “stand alone”, I think out of habit, that is what I did for most of web papers on Serendip. When I did postings or reading responses, I would usually read over my classmates’ responses, though my response did not always tie in with what they said. Some of my postings were in response to what my classmates said, and even when they weren’t, it was interesting when they did fit together nicely—such as when Anne put together a dialogue of our comments for class discussions. Looking back on my web papers and posts, I think that over time I can see an increasing porosity in my writing. In the beginning of the semester, it felt that my papers were very “stand alone” and mono-disciplinary. Over time though, I think that my writing for one class drew more on all of the classes more than it did on just the one I was writing for. In addition to my writing process, my thinking process has also become much more porous and interdisciplinary—I am better able to take on an interdisciplinary lens when thinking about and questioning a particular issue.

Over the past thirteen weeks, I have made significant progress in working toward each of the course’s respective goals. In Jody’s Ecologies of Minds and Communities course, we grappled with a lot of major issues: lack of access for some students to pristine green spaces and the outdoors, viewing industrial ruins as sites for growth and play, and unpacking environmental racism. A significant takeaway for me are ways to link activism in terms of bringing together social justice and environmental justice. The second major concept I will take from this class is the idea that Dorceta Taylor named in her essay: re-framing. As a soon-to-be teacher working with kindergarten students, I will not be teaching an environmental education per say but I can still foster an ecological literacy in my students within other subject areas. A lot of the issues we touched upon in Jody’s class carried over into Anne’s course. In Re-creating Our World, I came to understand the idea of home as both a place of peace, comfort, security, and happiness, as a space I may also feel uncomfortable, challenged, and in exile in. I gained a much better grasp on the ways in which language can create, re-create, re-write, and represent different spaces. Sometimes, though, we are all like Kanai facing the tiger, in situations where words fail us. One other major breakthrough for me in English was seeing how porous we as humans are and how porous spaces we occupy can be. In Working with Economic Data, I felt that I did grow over the course of the semester, but do not yet have a full mastery of some of the concepts we learned in class. What I did learn more about is the analytical tools that economists can use in measuring and thinking of ways (like the Production-Possibility Frontier, Indifference Curves, and Opportunity Costs) to reduce humans’ impact on the environment. I do not feel like I fully mastered these analytical tools, but I now know more about what they do, how they function, and how they fit into the eco-literacy conversation.

At the beginning of the semester, I was nervous about completing the creative projects. Besides being involved in choir and A Cappella, I have rarely tapped into my creative side. I would never claim that my creative abilities are my strong suit. Therefore, I was feeling somewhat nervous about producing something that would be deemed to an outstanding, creative piece of work. The more I completed the creative projects each week, though, the less nervous I felt. This process also helped me embrace my porosity and to just allow whatever emerged from the different field trips to inspire my creative work. It was nice to have small creative projects or small additions to a large creative piece biweekly following the field trips. Sometimes, what emerged from the field trips was a “stand alone” creative work that was inspired organically from the trip. Other times, ideas for my larger creative work emerged from the field trip. Each field trip inspired something creative to come about. I felt most inspired by Tinicum Wildlife Refuge and the park we visited in Camden. As someone who does not know a significant amount about art to begin with, it was interesting to learn more about “Eco-Art” by researching my own artist and hearing from my classmates. Even though I would like to continue developing my own creative skills, particularly my photography and editing skills, engaging in the creative projects was a meaningful experience. I confronted a fear of engaging with my creative side and will certainly engage with it more in the future.

In this essay, I have diffracted and identified areas where I did not grow or gain as much of a mastery of a certain skill as I would have liked. This being said, I do not want these areas for further growth to overshadow the ways in which I have grown alongside my friends, classmates, and Professors in this 360. In addition, I have gained practical skills and knowledge that I will serve me well in my teaching practice next year. I hope to never stop developing an eco-literacy and I wish to take ideas, thoughts, and breakthroughs outside the bounds of Bryn Mawr. I cannot express how meaningful and rich this experience has been. Taking this 360 has been one of the best parts of my Bryn Mawr experience, and I know that I have grown as a critical thinker, learner, and educator in so many ways. As Freire put it, I will continue reading the world and reading the world, allowing “the earth to [become] my blackboard; sticks, my chalk” (8).