For my inquiry project, I want to create or think about lessons plans for a high school classroom using The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X and Alex Haley. As I am using these two texts in my senior thesis project, I'm most interested in think about the ways these two text pair together to invite students to question the nature of religion. Baldwin and Malcolm X experience religion very differently from one another despite the fact that both discuss similar realities of racial oppression and the black and white binary in the US. I'm excited to see the extent to which discussing religion in the classroom is possible while being neither coercive or manipulative of student's beliefs.

The results of the pre-symposium workshop from SIGCSE 2015 are now available:

http://people.westminstercollege.edu/faculty/hhu/tides/sigcse2015.html

An unfinished, untitled poem-thing in verse form, attempting to explore some feelings/observations having coming back from the Sonoran Desert. Mostly some gestures towards changes I'm noticing in my perceptions of "the natural world" and my site during this snowy spring afternoon. I've included an image from my site sit below as well.

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For the rest of the semester, I’ve decided to change up my site sit. Recently I wandered through the Sunken Garden on a walk around campus, and I think that is where I’d like to return to for a little while.  I visited it today in the snow, excited for the peace and to experience the dampening of sound that makes the world serene and quiet as white flakes float towards the earth. Instead, I was greeted with the noise of Haffner construction. It wasn’t exactly was I was expecting, but I found that after a while, I didn’t mind it that much. It was loud and unpredictable, but it was part of that place at that moment in time, and a reminder that the places we live and work and wander through on campus did not simply spring from the ground one day fully formed.

I decided I wasn't going to change my site because unlike a lot of the other sites, I found I tended to not have extra visitors. 

When I went today, I had to be a little careful because there was no way of telling where the stairs where and I didn't want to slip. Once I got to my site, I was happier than I had ever been there. I had been having an incredibly good day and even though the snow was shocking, I loved it. The temperature wasn't too cold and the snow was falling so softly and I was just happy. I spent more time there than I had originally meant to because I got a little lost in observing my surroundings and everything that was happening both inside and outside my head. 

Today is the day of the March Equinox. The sun is shining directly on the equator, perfectly splitting night and day into equal lengths. Standing by the duck pond, under this thick March snowfall, it seemed that the night and day were blurred together, rejecting their stark divide. I’m not going to waste time complaining about the snow--as my friend at the Dining Center said, “why stress about things out of our control? You can’t stop the snow”. Instead I want to share with you a word I was reflecting on by the four stepping stones: imagination.

This was the first time visiting my site in while (about a month with spring break, visiting someone elses, looking up the history instead). 

The sun was shining and the wind seemed to be in a better mood than usual. It felt wispier compared to the harshness I felt during the week earlier. The sun gave the campus a really nice shadow and, for the first time, I  was able to notice the pond behind Rhoads. It looked like one of those lakes at a camp, but without a blob. I think the college should remove the geese , make the lake deeper, place a blob in the lake. College already feels like a camp, the blob would be a great addition.

Although I did express that I was a little disappointed that I didn't get to choose a place around campus (and in retrospect I probably could have found an appropiate and interesting indoor locale), I still found it interesting to watch the class in the space that we are usually in. Us going back indoors also presented some comparisons to meeting outside on Tuesday.

Today in class, Liz and I spent time looking at the word interdisciplinary. We looked up several definitions 

When Donna Haraway writes about contact zones in When Species Meet, she describes places where two things meet and simultaneously change each other.

art as a contact zone 

art history