Final Reflective Blog

Wobble: An unsteady movement from side to side, swaying, to tremble, to be weak.  When I hear the word wobble those are the words that come to mind.  For this blog I am supposed to think back to a time throughout the semester where something has made me wobble.  So, I went back to the first week of class and processed everything we did until the last week of class. 

At the beginning of each class we would do an Improv activity.  There were multiple ones we did throughout the semester but the ones that really stuck out to me were:  zip zap zop, yes and… word pass and gestures.  I’m sure those of you reading this know exactly what these are!  To be honest I didn’t like doing these at first.  9:30 a.m was just too early for my brain to be thinking and my body to be moving.  I know you are probably thinking, “Wow you must be lazy!”  But I promise I’m not!
Improv made me feel uncomfortable.  It challenged my thinking and made me feel very awkward.  Was this what Lacy was trying to make me feel like?  You see, for me, thinking of something to say on the spot while people were staring at me, judging me and waiting for me to speak, scared the heck out of me.  What if I said something stupid?  What if people looked at me weird because of what I said?  One of the ones we did that was most challenging was Word Pass.  One person would start off with a word and point to another person who would have to come up with another word related to it.  We would have to remember our word and the person we pointed to.  Eventually we would have two words and two people that we had to remember.  What was challenging was coming up with a word to say related to what the person before had just said.  Sometimes it took me a few seconds to think of what to say.  Half the time I would say my word it would be completely random and not related to the previous word whatsoever.  Did Lacy want us to keep the words related or did it not matter?  I got butterflies in my stomach, my heart started to beat fast and my brain would blank out.  The reason I got like this was because I have always been terrible with thinking “outside the box.”  You had to have an imagination in order to think in the way Lacy wanted us to think.  Or at least that’s what I think she wanted us to do. 

I think that the Improv’s we did were a form of wobbling because they made me feel uncomfortable, they challenged my thinking and made me think in a way that I was not used to.  Looking back at my experiences with doing the activity I can honestly say that it has helped my imagination grow and helped me think outside the box.  I can definitely tell that Improv has become easier for me than it was at the beginning of the semester.  I don’t think our Improv activities would be the same without the awesome people involved.  If someone said something completely random and funny we would all laugh (in a good way).  If I couldn’t think of something to say my classmates would help me out.  Knowing that they weren’t going to judge what I said made me feel a little bit better. I still wonder if this is what Lacy intended to happen with the Improv activites?  She never really told us why we did them....

This was a really great class!  It has made me write in a more creative way and showed me a different type of literacy I had never seen before.  Thanks Lacy.  Hope everyone has a fabulous Christmas! 

Final Literacy Narrative Blog

When we first got this assignment I was actually pretty excited.  It didn't seem too hard and it sounded like it would be fun.  The hard part for me was figuring out what to write about.  I had to brainstorm a time or times when I had experienced literacy.  This is something I have never really thought about before so it took quite a while to come up with an idea.

Lacy gave us six note cards. On card one I wrote about my characteristics as a reader or writer.  Card two was a freewrite where I proposed my idea.  Cards three and four I expanded on my idea.  On card five I described my situation as a metaphor. And on the last card I wrote my final proposal for the essay.  I like doing things in steps.  These cards really helped me figure out what to write about.  I veered slightly from what I had originally proposed but I think that was for the better.

I like to change things quite often but the revision process was challenging for me.  I mostly just looked at the small gramatical errors and fixed those throughout my paper and fixed the sentences that were worded weird.  I realized that this was more editing than rivising.  I had to do something to make bigger changes in my essay.  I started to look back at the revision activities we did throughout class and found a lot of ways that I could change my essay.  I looked at my verbs to see if they were in the correct tense, looked at my opening line to make sure it was catchy enough and I looked to see if there was a point in my paper that lacked something.  I wrote in vivid, deep detail to describe what I was seeing and feeling.  I figured that this would be enough revision for now. 

For my final copy of my literacy essay I thought it would be a good idea to pull sentences at the end of my paper and put them in the opening paragraph.  Ya know switch some stuff around.  This helped me expand on a lot of stuff.  I tried to write more "in the moment" to see what that would do. 

The revision process had me very frustrated at times.  I would get to a point where I thought I had put everything I could into my essay.  I knew that there had to be more I could do... I would take a break from writing and come back with a crisp, clear head to get working on it again.  Overall this was a positive experience and one that I would (for the most part) love to do again. 

Ethnography Project Reflective Blog

Recently my group and I have completed our final Ethnography Project.  I must say that it is a relief to have it all done!  I have decided to take a look back in time to when we first began this project.  It all started with the Mini Mapping Assignment we did where I had to map out a place on campus where there was a hidden literacy. 

I chose to go with the visual category and that ended up turning into art.  The next day in class we shared what we uncovered and were placed into groups based on our similar categories.  There were three other people who did art, Nora, Cory and Taylor.  We got together and began sharing our thoughts and ideas.

We decided to take the idea of art and think about the different types, leading us to think about sculptures.  So we decided that we would each have a seperate sculpture and interview people about what they think of the piece.  We put together a few questions on what we would ask the people.  After this we conducted a Google document with everyone's interviews.  We thought this would be a good thing to uses because we can edit it at any time and also share it with everyone in the group, including Lacy. 

After we had this done we were king of stumped on what to do next.  How were we suppose to connect all of these to literacy and make it interesting?  We decided to do four acts for each one of us.  We would be doing interviews with discussion in between each interview to respond. 

It seemed like a great idea at first.  We would just have to record our voices and that was that.  In class, we did some research on the different kinds of audo players we could record our voices with, but none of them seemed to work.  Finally we realized that we were going to have to do a video because that would actually show the sculptures.  It would be much easier this way because we could just use iMovie and people could get a visual of what we were talking about. 

So, we met outiside of class on a beautiful day, and got to work.  Prior to us meeting, each of us had to record our interviews and respones so that Nora could record them on her computer.  It did not take us long to get the final copy of our video.  Yeah we had to do a lot of retakes because I would end up laughing but that was one of the fun things about it. 

Overall I really enjoyed this project!  It was a lot of work at times but I still had fun while I was doing it.  It actually wasn't very hard for our group to decided what we were going to do our project on.  Nora is an art major so of course she really wanted to do something with art!  The revision process was a lot.  We would have one good idea then realize it wasn't going to work so we would have to change it.  I couldn't have asked for a better group.  They are awesome.  Everyone put in time to the project, we all got along and we had fun while producing our Ethography.  It was definetely different for me to create a video instead of writing a boring essay about Ethnography.  It helps you see it differently.  If you would like to take another look at our final piece, here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG3PCs4Rbjk

Thanks!