When I am tagging all my paper as web events, I start my reflection automatically. As I click in and reread all my papers written in this semester, I have a special and fascinating emotions. I feel like I’m a spectator and witness the progress of myself in this class.

Prison Reflection

            In my saved files on my computer, I titled the post I wrote after that class (you know the one I’m talking about) ‘The Hardest One Yet”.

Thinking ecologically with economics

What emerged during my meeting

Academically, I am typically resistant to change. I have always had trouble revising my writing, feeling either that it would take too much effort to re-work it or that it simply wasn’t necessary. Rather than reaching towards new subjects and sub-topics within courses, I tend to dig deeper into subjects in which I am already well-versed, confident, and comfortable. Coming from an elementary school and a high school where reflection was a constant process and a large part of how I was evaluated, I learned to reach toward the personal during these reflective exercises, rather than examining how I had grown in the more traditional, academic sense.

Through this course, I struggled a lot to get done with readings and writings every week. I regretted many times that I should have practiced English more before I came here. Now, however, I am sure that I learnt a lot from this course and I have found new various different perspectives in myself.

         I didn’t initially realize how difficult it would be to discuss, reflect upon, and try to explain the complex and multiple layers of the prison-industrial complex that people’s projects portrayed. I was particularly impressed and appreciated the conversations I had following the gallery opening, listening to people share stories of the different connections they made between their projects and others, as well as how they chose to express the research they had completed. I especially appreciated how people’s artwork was incorporated into the shared space. Our collective work about challenging and seeking to understand incarceration seeped through conversations and the silences of what was unknown and left unexplained.

The true ecological intelligence

December 15^th, 2015

When we are babies we learn language by mimicking the sounds we hear our parents say. As children, we are caricatures of the environment that we are growing up in. If as humans, we learn and grow by mimicking our environment it can be argued that by learning about and experiencing other cultures we are able to diversify our understanding of the world.   Ecological Intelligence is about the world not just the environment, we must foster relationships between different cultures and environments in order to grow and diversify as a world community.

I have never taken a class quite like this. I remember my first essay I wrote for Changing Our Stories was about how coming to Bryn Mawr was what felt like a tourist experience. I talked about how my school was in the city and that my classes were not very rigorous or engaging. This ESEM was both of those things. I have learned so much in the last few months from so many different people, and I have read so many thought provoking articles that have inspired a level of learning and understanding that has been both enjoyable and tough.