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            In retrospect, it seems kind of funny that I ever signed up for a 360 called “Eco-Literacy”, because I’ve never considered myself much of an environmental person.  In fact, if the posters hadn’t emphasized how the 360 would focus on the connections between environmental and social justice, piquing my interest as a sociology major primarily concerned with human-centric issues of inequality, I likely wouldn’t have even considered applying for the cluster.  Ultimately it was the connections to my sociology interests addressed by the advertising for the 360, as well as my interest in 360s and general and the good things I’d heard about the professors, that led me to join this community. 

            Three and a half months after our first classes, reflecting on the journey I’ve had the privilege to take with everyone this semester, I still wouldn’t call myself an “environmental person”.  This is in part because I want to spend my life working on issues like prison abolition and queer rights, which are not usually considered environmentally-related, but also because I’ve come to reject the binary of environmental and social and the idea that it’s possible to engage in social justice work without addressing environmental issues.  Throughout this 360, my social justice focus hasn’t shifted so much as expanded, opening my eyes to how my sociology lens can often be too narrow when it fails to see the ecological and the social as inextricably connected.   

            To reflect critically on my engagement and learning this semester, I first want to start by addressing each individual class, and then move into creative component and the 360 as a whole.

            Out of the three classes, economics was the one that I struggled the most to engage myself fully in.  It often felt somewhat separate from the rest of the 360 for me, partly because it was always first in the day so we didn’t have the other classes fresh in our minds to draw upon, and partly because there were non-360 students in the class and I didn’t want to exclude them by talking about material from our other classes that they weren’t familiar with.  While I was able to bring economics into our education and English discussions somewhat, I would have liked to integrate economics more with the rest of my 360 experience.  That being said, I think that I was engaged with the material in the economics class itself.  I wrote quality and on-time memos, and did the Sapling learning assignments and most of the assigned reading.  I think that I have a good understanding of the quantitative tools we’ve learned about and how to explain those tools to others, which I’ve demonstrated in the memos and midterms.  While I attended most of the classes, I don’t think I contributed to class discussion as much as I could have.  This is partly because 10am feels early for me (even though I know it isn’t for most people) and I didn’t feel fully awake a lot of the time, and partly because I didn’t feel like I had anything to add to class discussions or didn’t find the discussions engaging.  I really enjoyed how, increasingly during the second half of the semester, we had more theoretical discussions that moved beyond understanding of quantitative tools to address larger issues of environmental justice, social justice, and capitalism, and I think that I contributed more to those discussions than to ones earlier in the semester.  Also, as someone who’s taken multivariable calculus and linear algebra, I sometimes found myself disengaged from class work because I was familiar with the math being used and quickly figured out how to do the problems.  Of course this class is a 100-level, and I didn’t expect there to be more advanced math involved, but at the same time one of my favorite moments in the class was when I tried to solve a problem on our second midterm using an integral.  I failed at doing this because I couldn’t remember how to solve the integral (a product of not having taken a calculus course since high school), but the realization that I could derive the formula I needed for the problem from another one we were given in class, and that I knew how that process should work even if I couldn’t complete it, was exciting for me.  Ultimately, while I did quality work for our economics class and mastered many of the analytical tools we were taught, I wish that I had increased my efforts to contribute to all class discussions and integrate what I was learning with the rest of our 360.

            Before this 360, I had never taken or really thought about taking an education class.  I’ve never been particularly interested in teaching—as I’ve said in class, working with children often makes me feel nervous and overwhelmed, because I worry that I won’t be able to connect with them and their constant movement and noise is too much sensory input for me.  That being said, while I wasn’t always overly excited about the curriculum planning parts of our education class, I loved learning about the theory behind education and questioning how education can be used to promote social and environmental change.  Readings such Urban Wildscapes and Chet Bower’s Steps to the Recovery of Ecological Intelligence challenged me to think about the purpose of education and play, and how education affects and is affected by other institutions and social systems.  My favorite writing assignment for the class was my paper on concerns about safety as a challenge to environmental education, because I was able to integrate what I learned from our class discussions and readings with my prior knowledge about neoliberalism, and I felt like I was successful in making connections and analyzing how issues of education and childhood development are related to larger political and economic changes.  While I was most engaged with the more theoretical components of the course, I think that my engagement and work was evident throughout the class.  I usually came to class prepared, or at least having skimmed the readings when I didn’t have time to read every word, and I did all of the web postings on time and put effort into them.  Most of my web postings were individual, not responding directly to others’ posts, and, while I think that my web postings were generally well-written and interesting, I wish I had taken more time to read and comment on others’ work.  I was an active participant in class discussions, sometimes bringing in a different perspective from my peers and supporting my position even if it differed from others’ views, while of course listening to what others had to say and often changing my thinking somewhat because of that.  In this way, I think that I contributed to my peers’ learning as well as my own, because I would bring a sociological perspective to our discussions to complement the perspectives other people brought.  Overall, I would say that I was successful in engaging with the learning goals for this course, because I’d never thought about environmental education before and, throughout this course, I was constantly challenged to think about the purpose of education and how to educate diverse groups of people.  I think that I still have a lot of room for growth in the area of curriculum planning and actual teaching, because I still don’t feel comfortable with applying my theoretical knowledge to classroom situations or interacting directly with students, and I would like to learn how to feel more comfortable in a teaching role.

            Going into the Eco-Literacy 360, English was definitely the class about which I felt most comfortable and was most excited.  I have always considered myself a good reader and writer—I have read voraciously for as long as I can remember, have done a lot of creative writing especially in middle and high school, and have always enjoyed and been successful in English classes.  That being said, while English might not have challenged me, as economics and education did, to explore a discipline I was uncomfortable or unfamiliar with, I think that a lot of my best work and most profound engagement occurred in English.  I started off the semester in a rather difficult personal place, struggling to accept my sexuality, and I used a small part of my first English paper to try to process and explain those feelings.  Reading Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride greatly impacted me, as I was forced for the first time to realize how much shame I have internalized about my sexuality, and felt that my identity was labeled as undesirable even within a text that is supposed to celebrate queerness.  While this experience was undeniably painful, reading and discussing the text, as well as writing about pride in relation to my sexuality and then more broadly in my second paper, gave me a space to begin to process my internalized shame that I don’t know if I could have found elsewhere.  I am proud of the ways in which my second paper started with the personal, my lack of pride in my sexuality, and expanded to talk about the politics and porosity (or lack thereof) of pride.  Making the leap from the personal to the social is something I believe is crucial for critical analysis and creating change, and I was happy that I was able to look beyond just my own feelings and write a paper that placed my experience within a larger context.  After the second paper, when we moved into All Over Creation and eventually The Hungry Tide, my experience in English became less directly personal, but I remained equally engaged with the texts, class discussions, and writing assignments.  I was almost always prepared for class, devouring the novels and articles, and I contributed actively and regularly to class discussions.  As in education, I think I was successful in bringing a different perspective to many of our class discussions which, along with my peers’ insights, helped make discussions interesting and thought-provoking.  While we might have spent some time talking in circles, I didn’t feel too frustrated about that, because I felt like even our circular discussions helped me begin a process of thinking about issues of representation that will continue long after this 360.  I wrote my four web papers and weekly paragraph postings for Serendip on time, and I think that they were generally high quality and helped me expand my thinking.  I would often bring my learning from sociology and occasionally physics into my writing, and several times my postings generated online and in-class discussion among my peers.  That being said, I did write more stand-alone posts than I probably should have, and I wish I had read and commented more on my peers’ work.  I didn’t comment on more of my peers’ work largely because I was always busy and didn’t feel like I had time to post more than the required amount, but I know that my learning would have been enhanced if I had found the time to use Serendip more for its intended function of generating conversation and less as just a place to post my individual writing.  The times I did read and comment on my peers’ work, such as when I responded to sara.gladwin’s post on language in The Hungry Tide, were powerful and eye-opening for me, and I learned a lot from my classmates’ thinking.  While I am definitely leaving English less certain of what I learned than in education and economics, where I can identify concrete ideas and tools that I am now familiar with, I know that my thinking about issues of representation—whether it is possible to fully understand or represent another, the limits and possibilities of language, etc.—has expanded far beyond where it was before this course.  Perhaps it’s funny that I feel like I learned and challenged myself the most in English, when I am least able to identify what that learning was, but I think my fondness for theory and big picture ideas leads me to be content even when I can’t wrap everything up nicely at the end of the semester. 

            Coming into the 360, I was very excited for the creative projects, because I thought that they would be a different and interesting way to engage with the topic of eco-literacy.  While I still think this is true, I am not sure that I learned as much from the creative and eco-artist projects as I thought that I would.  I really enjoyed taking photos on our field trips, and I liked my idea for the first creative project of pairing photos from Tinicum and Audubon Park in New Orleans to highlight interactions between humans and the environment, but I don’t think I learned from this experience as much as I used the project to visually illustrate what I was learning elsewhere.  Similarly, while I found learning about the Nazca Lines for the eco-artist project fascinating, I don’t think that experience contributed much to my overall learning in the 360.  Part of my issue with the creative component is that it was much more time-consuming than I expected, and I didn’t have the time to put into the projects to get the results that I would have liked.  While I think I put the amount of time and effort into my creative work that was reasonable for the 360, I think that the assignments would have benefitted from more time spent working on them than the 360 was structured to allow us. 

            One of my favorite parts of the 360 was the field trips.  I loved our excursions to places like Tinicum and Laurel Hill, because I had the opportunity to walk by myself and with others, and mull over what we’d been talking about in class in environments that were conducive to further reflection and insight.  As I said when I talked about the education class, I was nervous prior to both trips to work with the 5th grade students in Camden but, even though the experiences were exhausting for me, they were also powerful and rewarding.  I was frustrated that the second lesson didn’t go as well as I wanted, because the students had a hard time focusing and I don’t know what, if anything, they learned from pretending to be moonlings and earthlings figuring out how to live together, but I loved seeing the students having fun and the experience helped me think about how better to design lessons in the future. 

            The story slam was one of the components of this 360 that I felt least engaged with and, as result, even though I contributed to the effort through advertising and helping set and clean up, I think that my involvement with the event was more limited than it should have been.  I never felt excited about the idea of a story slam because it felt too individual to me, too much a space for feelings sharing and not enough a space for creating meaningful change.  However, since I didn’t have a better idea for what we as a class should do, and I was honestly too exhausted from personal stuff I was dealing with all semester to spearhead another initiative, I didn’t say anything and let others take the lead in planning the event.  While I think that the event was a great success in terms of what it was designed to do, more because of my classmates’ efforts than anything my advertising or set up/ clean up work did, I still remain somewhat frustrated by the entire endeavor, both because I don’t know if or how it had any meaningful large-scale impact and because I didn’t propose an alternative event or become more invested in the planning and implementation of the story slam.  My limited engagement with the story slam is one of my biggest regrets from this 360, especially since I think that I was overall very engaged in every other aspect of the cluster, and if I could do this experience again I would step up and challenge all of us to come up with a class initiative that would better address eco-literacy or at least become more invested in the story slam once we had all committed to holding it.

            This semester has been my favorite one academically at Bryn Mawr so far, and that’s entirely because of this 360.  I will be forever grateful for what I have learned here but, even more than that, for the community that I have found.  Most of my previous educational experiences have focused a lot more on the material being taught than on the community in the classroom, but this 360 focused on both, and I know that I only learned and challenged myself as much as I did because I had such a strong community to support and learn with me.  I wouldn’t say that I see the world radically differently after this experience, but I am now much more aware of how environments and ecologies intersect with every aspect of our lives, and I am still in the process of trying to figure out so many issues we’ve explored this semester, like how education can help create meaningful change and the importance and limits of empathy and whether we can ever really represent or understand each other.  For my banner image, I am choosing a photo that I took at Tinicum, my shadow cast on the sideboards of the bridge and the ice beyond.  I like this image because shadows are a kind of representation, and this representation has holes in it, is incomplete, and yet still captures something valuable.  I also think that this picture represents my learning this semester—I’ve asked a lot of questions, and figured out some answers, but I still have a long way to go to fill in the gaps in my understanding and worldview.  Of course the shadow will keep evolving, and I’ll never have all of the answers, but this 360 has helped me realize that we’ll never be able to fully understand the world in which we live and I’m okay with that.