Walled Women

            My group’s final project was a workshop that touched on different types of oppression and ways in which different groups are silenced on campus. We explore voice and Jody’s by educating people on the different ways in which privilege appears on campus. We used the discussion-based way of teaching/learning in our workshop. We explore the notion of vision and Barbs class by making the participants think about their niches on campus and where it is that they feel comfortable and where they do not. We used silence in our workshop by having silent discussions and giving people time to reflect on what they have seen on the posters before commenting. We also had a Delpit way of “teaching”. Throughout most of the workshop (i.e. cross the line activity) our point would get across depending on how the participants interpreted the activity. Throughout that activity, we included questions that touched on religion, gender and sexuality and race with the hopes that the participants would make the connections themselves.

Initially when I was discussing writing my reflection with Anne, she suggested that I write one for both the 360 and Ecological Imaginings because so many of my connections in both classes were deeply intertwined with one another. I ultimately decided against this because I wanted to give both classes distance from one another because there are many ways in which I also see the points at which they do not intersect. However, it was not until I was looking over my posts on Serendip to do my reflections that I could really visually see the ways in which the 360 course cluster and my Ecolit class overlapped. Many of my connections to Ecological Imaginings were finding the ways in which the Environment movement is racially and class exclusive, something I had never realized or encountered before. My concept of the way nature affects people significantly influenced how I perceived the Prison environment. One of the other connections I began to make toward the end of the course was between Jody’s education course and Ecolit revolved around divergent thinking and “play.” I began to wonder if the ways in which we are taught to focus in school, and filter out divergent thoughts was not ecologically friendly because we are taught to filter out of the “distracting” environment as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvwFc-6kWys

When Danielle and I first started envisioning our final project, we were both very drawn to the idea of looking at privilege. Danielle had been thinking about doing a zine on the topic of privilege, but when we discovered our mutual interest in video-making, we thought that might be another way of sharing the thoughts that have come out of our class in an accessible and fun way. We really wanted to look at how Bryn Mawr impacts and is impacted by differences in privilege and one of the places we started our search was the classroom.

In order to avoid stigmatizing a specific professor or set of students, Danielle wrote a script that we used as the basis for our fictional classroom scene. One of the things I’ve really noticed as a result of practicing silence and thinking about how much space my words take up in the classroom – as well as comparing our Bryn Mawr speaking experience with being in the Cannery – was how people’s notice of vocal space (or lack of notice) really impacts the classroom environment.

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.

http://youtu.be/c2Ykntn0k4E

Oh I’m done with school, I’m out of motivation

I’m walking through a fog of stifled dreams

There will always be something missing here

Falsely composed

Trying to ignore finals week hysteria, 99 problems, and more

Oh I’m ready to go forward

Ready or not here I come

Dreams are arising from the unconscious C

I'm I'm excited for what's to come

I'm facing reality finding new purpose in life

I want to live my life on my terms

I want to live full-heartedly

Falsely composed

Trying to ignore finals week hysteria, D99 problems, and more

Welcome everybody! We're happy that you’ve joined us here to see what we've learned in our 360° this semester. A 360° is a cluster of interdisciplinary courses that look at one main theme. Ours is called Women in Walled Communities.
 
In The Rhetorics of Silence, we examined the many functions and meanings of silence: as a political tool, an imaginative space, and a powerful form of communicative expression--as well as the result of lack of agency and or the denial of voice.

In Learning in Institutional Spaces, we explored how the institutions of schools and prisons promote or inhibit learning. It was in this course that we looked most critically at this institution, Bryn Mawr College, and its own history of power and oppression, which sparked a lot of interest in Perry House as an embodiment of some of that history.

Here's the introductory podcast.  It's a more polished, expanded version of what you saw at the final presentation

We recorded our livepodcast but be warned: it's INCREDIBLY soft.  I suggest you pump up the volume for it.  It's shared in a google doc here (I need to sign up for podcast permission from itunes in order to get a more formal way to share things with everyone, so this will have to do for now)

Here's the script we had for monday's presentation:

INTRODUCTION

I’m Irene Shin ‘13

Chandrea Peng ‘15

Yiran Zhang ‘14

Irene: Over the past several weeks, the three of us have interviewed several students on this campus to get a better understanding of the following question: what is it like to identify as East Asian at Bryn Mawr?

As you heard in my own interview with Danielle for her final project, my own motivations for being a part of this project can be summed up as so:  I consider the East Asian demographic as a sleeping giant of sorts: an integral part of Bryn Mawr’s landscape but not foregrounded in any conversation on campus. 

Our final 360 project aims to 1) give that space that has yet to exist and 2) understand why East Asians have a tendency not to speak on this issue to begin with.

Here are some images that represent our project. The first portion is what we showed during our final presentation. 

Collaborators (AKA Book Buyin' Bitches): Hayley, Julia and Jacky 

Enjoy! 

Developing and carrying out a final project that revolved around a subject which interested us felt like a perfect way to culminate our experience and learning together this semester. As one who has depended on books for various reasons for most of my life and never had to question my own literacy, the idea of Books Behind Bars in its effort to both raise consciousness about issues surrounding literacy, privilege and social distance as well as money to buy books for incarcerated women felt particularly close to home. While it was a topic that was personal to me, I saw much potential in BBB in that it had the ability to reach across and off campus, affecting both Bryn Mawr students and the larger population of incarcerated women that we had grown close to. Additionally, our consciousness-raising efforts were particularly far reaching in that our fliers were distributed across campus and thus hopefully engaged even those who were not in attendance of our final presentation. Although it may be impossible to determine how individuals reacted to our thought-provoking marketing techniques, I see the monetary success of our collection (we raised over $165!) as an indication that people not only noticed the flyers but thought about what they meant and why the issues they raised are important.