December 11, 2016 - 22:43
I think like many people in this class, I really had no idea what this ESEM was going to be about. Identity and environment are vague enough buzzwords that it could have been about anything. I was pleasantly surprised as the goal of this class became clearer to me. I really enjoyed grappling with the intersection of human identities and environmental justice. I also loved finding connections between the content of this class and things I am passionate about/knowledgeable about outside of school (I'm thinking specifically about the field trip to Norris Square Garden which was really impactful for me.) As someone who is interested in science and humanities and isn’t sure how to bring the two together, I think this class was perfect for me. Before this class, I was unsure of how I wanted to go about my education here but now I feel like I know that I don’t want to be exclusively a STEM person or exclusively a social sciences or humanities person. These were kind of the options I had for my educational identity in high school (especially as I had to market myself to colleges) and to some degree there is still the same divide at Bryn Mawr but I think it’s important to me to span these two overarching disciplines.
This class certainly challenged me with difficult readings and frequent writing. I am glad Anne kept pushing me to write more, complexify my ideas, and take risks. Although the weekly papers seemed to get more and more challenging for me as the semester went on, I think I am overall proud of the work I produced. I realize that I was not good at meeting deadlines with these papers (5 were on time, 4 were late by as much as a few hours, 4 were super late) and I think this is because I felt that each paper had to be better than the next and this pressure I put on myself made me fearful of starting a paper without already having an amazing, nuanced perspective to write about. (Also I found Friday deadlines challenging because I’m tired by the end of the school week but that’s no excuse!) Hopefully, this writing regimen has made me aware of this bad habit so I won’t continue this practice. Nevertheless, I feel like this personal challenge did not interfere with the classroom experience. I came to every class with the readings completed and ready to discuss.
Attending class was probably the most valuable part of this course for me. I definitely enjoyed reading on my own (especially the novels and short stories), but I gained so many new perspectives and interpretations of these texts from my classmates. It feels strange to me to single out who specifically I learned most from but I think I definitely learned something from everyone. Our geographic diversity (and our cultural backgrounds tied to those places where we grew up) seemed particularly prevalent in our diversity of opinions. In the past, I would usually come out of discussions with the same perspective/opinion/understanding I went in with, but in this class my peers often made me rethink my initial reactions. In terms of my contributions to the class, I think I spoke an appropriate amount. I noticed, however, that often I don’t feel I have something valuable to say until the end or I notice something I want to share but it always happens at the end. I think I am primarily a listener and then I come to a personal understanding after considering everything that has been presented. In smaller group work, I find that I assume the role of a facilitator. I often share my opinion last and try to figure out how everyone in the group can share their idea and have their idea reflected in whatever we do.
I am particularly proud of my work on the 6 week project for this class. Together, my partner Jennifer and I really addressed identities, the environment, and the contact zones between them - for example, between Dining Service and the students, each with their individual cultural identity; between Dining Services and all the distributors, recyclers, and farms; and the lack of contact between students and these companies or farms. I really did work about 1-3 hours on it each week, whether it was setting up interviews, conducting interviews over the course of the project, transcribing notes from interviews, or doing a little bit of additional research online. I did 1 or 2 interviews each week and evenly distributed the work I intended to do over the six weeks. Shockingly, this made it really easy and stress free! Although the current format of the project is not super accessible/gripping, I believe I collected a lot of valuable information that satisfied my goal of illuminating the chain of events/people/companies involved in dining hall food service. From working on a school newspaper in high school, interviewing people is one of my strengths and so I think that helped me work on this project efficiently and not take on more than what was actually doable in a short amount of time. If I had the time, I’m sure I could write my findings into a cool feature article… but I’m also ready to take what I learned from this class and move forward.