Sharing my course experience

Notes:

Presenting a close-up look on my experience with the course topic and the English classroom.

Later expanding on the bigger picture about my learnings on “genre”.

Black Hole: First starting off the course, I was confused where I stood: how identified myself, the genre of student I was, my belonging in the course. I was faced with many questions about my identity in this genre of classroom but I eventually sought for the light in learning something new.

Transformation/translation: The course was about translating my ideas and culture in a new setting. I had to transform beyond my science training and further expand my well-roundedness in the liberal arts setting

and

Extend my hand’s reach to the digital humanities

and explore new horizons as I participated in the

Open sources of learning : the Internet, the text, the author, Anne Dalke and my classmates. I eventually found the classroom as a space for sharing ideas, our backgrounds, our stories. In the midcourse evaluation, I admitted “The past month has been an enjoyable journey in digital writing but I remain a tourist in the field”. Although it might have not been visible, my thoughts were sometimes not spoken out as I thought they might break the interesting discussions my classmates had. I preferred to listen and learn.

But overall, I was offered a new perspective on the humanities classroom as a

Laboratory . According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a laboratory is something likened to a scientific laboratory, esp. in being a site or centre of development, production, or experimentation. The classroom continued to express all of those things throughout the course of the semester.  We as a class developed new perspectives and understandings of the material on genre and produced our angle of the story every Sunday night or in the webpapers. We had a chance to experiment with different ideas and with the members in our classroom. Credits to dglasser for further playing with this idea with the EnglishLab.

I was breaking from my preconceived ideas on humanities and entering a space for self-exploration and cultural immersion; it was a cultural as well as an academic experience for me.

I was introduced to a new structure on genre and how content and form play in the their construction. Genre was presented, beyond any boundaries, to define a structure, a recipe to which pieces of work followed but which were not bound or written necessarily in stone. Genre of the classroom, the self, the other, the audience. Those were as much a focus of our classroom discussion as literary genres.

The Graphic narrative became a new adventure for myself. I was amused by the iconic representation, the importance on the visual, and how it interplayed with the written. I found a safe hiding place in the gutter, where I drew connections with the characters and with myself.

It was a game of you with the frames. A game of visualizing, connecting, and relating. I read myself in Persepolis. It became a crucial point in the course of the semester. I had a self-moment where I was there again in a black hole questioning myself and reminded of who I was and what I should change.

I hence realized that the humanities, as presented in the course was as much about identifying with the text, culture, and concepts as it was about critical analysis. 

 Extending to the larger picture, applying the tetrad of media effects to examine what Literary Kinds, Emerging Genres which

Enhanced the Originality in genre. Genre offers a foundation, a structure of reference, a convenient way to categorize. But it is about the originality, the bending of the rules, and the making of the spectacular.

Retrieved that genres evolve and transform. From paper to digital. From text to the visual. From stories about people and interactions. Life and science.

Reversed the rigidity in humanities. Humanities allow a space for inter-cultural immersion and sharing of stories. My conception of humanities as an opposite to science was reversed entire;y/

Obsolesced the Fixed genre type. I overall realized that genre is far from fixed and I am left with a fluid idea of genre.