This semester in praxis taught me a lot about myself as a student and as a learner. Each class I was meet with personal challenges that i had to either confront in class, or with myself later afterwards. This was the first time that I was prompted to think about what my educational experience was like and how it may have impacted my identity as a learner/student. The class provided me with an opportunity to think about how my identity may have aided or hindered my access to education and other privileges in society. And the process of working at a cite in the city allowed me to see how these privileges and setbacks actually manifest in the American Education system. 

            I am most proud of how my writing has changed throughout the course of the semester. When I began, I wrote essays that did not progress, but generally began the same way they ended. At the start of the semester, I took on topics that I was personally interested in, but the way I discussed and interpreted them did not necessarily make difficult and complex claims. With this last revision, I have completely restructured the way I write a paper, and the beginning is ambiguous, but the thesis and main idea of my paper become clearer as I explain what the “mindset of the oppressed” means. I think I started by simply placing quotes into papers that though related to my topics were not effectively connected to the ideas that proceeded and came after.

“We our working to decolonize our bodies,” a young Bolivian womyn proclaimed in Spanish. People were bending, shifting, shaping their bodies in uncomfortable, almost unnatural ways. The womyn continued, “We have been oppressed for centuries and have been forced to work in the mines. Our bodies have been shaped by history. Our bodies have been taught and manipulated to bend to the oppressor. We need to remember the ways we moved before the colonizers came. We have to erase their imprint. We need to listen to our bodies’ natural movements.”

“It’s not like it says SYSTEM on the Door”:

Capitalism, Aging, & Systematized Oppression
in Susan Nussbaum’s Good Kings Bad Kings

Final Praxis Evaluation

The school that I was placed in is one of a kind. My field site was a high school that first opened its doors this year. The school only consists of first years. And its student population is predominantly Black and Latino/a with a very diverse teaching/administrative staff. Upon my first arrival, I my surroundings made me realized that it was located on the outskirts of Philadelphia, in a dilapidated section of the city. The community surrounding the school seemed in need of renovation, but obviously, did not have the money to do so, rendering it defenseless against gentrification. The neighboring university is currently encroaching the small community.

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.

I don’t know what I would have done without this 360 looking back I'm not sure if I'll ever have the chance again to get to critically explore my own identity in the classroom. Ann Balay challenged that we do not bring our bodies into academia. We did that the semester by talking to ourselves but also with the art but we did with Riva. And wasn't it scary? Usually in class we talk about theory but we don't get the chance to put it in practice. I'm so glad that we got to go to Camphill. I don't think that our discussions about disability and representation would've been as productive, personable, and ethical if we didn't get the chance to see what we were talking about in action.

Rebecca Cook

360 Cluster: Identity Matters

December 17, 2014

Self Evaluation and Reflection: Rebecca Cook

though I am constantly resistant to posting work on serendip that I've deemed unfit to be seen yet, I need to just get this up here and let it be a visibily evovling work rather then another abandoned document. 

This past semester has been a period of intense transformation for the Bryn Mawr-Riverside Book club. The future of our group seems all at once full of possibility and uncertainty. As I write today with the intention of reflecting on our past, interrogating our present, and envisioning our future as an established program on Bryn Mawr’s campus, I cannot help but pause for a moment to consider just how far back I need to reach in order to more fully illustrate what this book club has come to represent.