December 19, 2014 - 12:18
It’s become difficult to make sense of my learning process without considering it within the context of a whole. I see this itself as a product of my learning: I seek points of connection as a way to make individual learning experiences more meaningful and relevant. Along with this idea, I find that part of my learning process is to be consistently reflexive about the work I am doing, which seems to make it more difficult to go through this process at the end. However, for as often as I felt like I was writing and reflecting, I am disappointed that it seemed so hard for me to put these thoughts up on Serendip. I think in this way, I did not allow myself to utilize Serendip to it’s full potential for teaching and learning. However, one of my greatest revelations of this semester was that by learning to love my own process and how that shapes my identity as a student, I could also learn to love myself. This course has definitely provided some of the pieces that made way for this revelation, as I have been paying closer attention to the way in which the label of “student” affects our identities, and recognizing that the expectations for ideal “student” can be destructive towards identity formation. In working towards feeling compassion for myself, I can hopefully better attend to the shape of my learning throughout the semester.
As I worked on my final field paper, I found myself frustrated that the written version of “what happened here” didn’t seem to convey how meaningful the experience actually was. While I don’t believe that the “Zine” could actually fully encompass the experience at Riverside, it feels more honest to me- and like the Literacy Group, at times- messy, full of holes, but mostly pleasurable to look at, think about, and hopefully engaging on a critical level. I also chose this format because I recognize how important it is continually practicing what I have come to believe about pedagogy, and learning takes different shapes, and therefore need to be representing in different ways.