First of all... WELCOME BACK It's so wonderful to be back and learning with you all, my dear friends.
Well, I think I might like a weird goal for Paideia this semester to be to spur a social movement on campus – perhaps it’s a small one, a local one, but I’d like to try and brainstorm ways to make both Paideia and the campus as a whole a more efficient and true liberal arts environment. In all my years here, I’ve had count ‘em ONE professor ask me how their coursework interacted with what I was learning in my other classes. I believe this is fundamentally wrong for teachers at a professed liberal arts institution. People need to get out of the mindset that they are teaching in or majoring in a single department & remember that everything is interrelated and that by looking at this wider scope we may discover ways of truly and meaningfully changing social systems in the future.
I’m learning about a lot of this ahora in my Rhetorics of Resistance and Principles of Economics classes (Econ being the ONE class to try and reach out to my other classes) and I truly believe that this is something we as Paideia students should’ve been required to do from the beginning. I know this is a tres ambitious goal but I think it may also be a doable one – at least a Begin-able one – and one for which we are all uniquely apt candidates to strive for given that we are seniors and would (hopefully) be pissing off all the students and professors EXCEPT those writing our letters of recommendation :p I mean, what would it take? Some petitions, some advertising, a facebook group, a couple tables in the Commons, maybe a speech in the Cove instead of a concert series, some letters to the Admins up top, some rogue professor support, and all for professors to just ask the question:
“How does this tie in with what you’re learning in your other classes?”
And maybe even assign a short paper or two per semester about how the material is related or may be influenced or apt for some other coursework in another class – I haven’t had a single problem doing this on my own time with classes as putatively distant as Exploring the Universe and Shakespeare Topics to classes as already clearly linked as Principles of Economics and Urban History. This would force students to think more completely and liberally about what they’re learning and thus would help them better appreciate all fields and knowledge, AN APPRECIATION FOR LEARNING ITSELF, and would force professors to return to working and better communicating with each other – maybe even create interdisciplinary projects together one day – and thus break up this anti-liberal segmentation that’s so easy and become so popular.
What do you all think?
I think this could also double as our civic engagement project.
As to my Intercultural Experience – that’s what my previous five or six blogs has been about. I went this summer first to South Carolina for a family vacation/mini reunion, then to Monterey, CA in order to present my Honor Thesis (which is also my Creative Works Research Project for Paideia (as well as for my American Studies Capstone)) (and it went amazingly beautifully wonderfully, by the way), and then I flew directly from CA to NYC in order to study Comparative Ethnic Urbanisms with NYU. It was a terrifying and sobering experience which has led me to better narrow my goals for my graduate study which now reach to study history as a webbed entity using literary works as focal points and from their work both as a constant volunteer and author in social activism to aid in environmental causes as well as in aiding in the end of educational inequality. I was dropped in a class of 8 people from different cities and countries to study together the urban enclaves of Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Latinos (Salvadorian, Mexican, Dominican, etc), and Arab peoples – not to mention the variety of cultural parades I ended up walking into from the Gay Pride Parade to the Pakistan Independence Parade. It was a wild ride that has spurred in me a greater need to dedicate my wonderful education and career goals to social activism – it has also spurred in me a great dislike of NYC as a city of sad people in a wreaking environment that just happens to house some of the most magnificent museums on the planet.
As for my Creative Works Honor Thesis:
I am very proud to tell you all that by graduation this spring, I may have an official book deal/contract with McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. I turned in a proposal of my Honor Thesis to them & they really dig it & so now we’re have contractual discussions :D Of course, they want an expanded version of my (so far) 96page thesis, so my actual Paideia/Capstone project will remain focused upon specifically Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the influences of Native American trickster mythology within it but the separate expanded versions it will also discuss up to seven other poems as well as broader protest and social movement affects, implications, ect. I’ve already, as aforementioned, finished the rough draft so now I’m dedicating this semester and next semester to editorial work. I’ve also, as aforementioned, already presented on this project, but I’m hoping to also have the time to present it at next semester’s Student Works Symposium.
I’m so excited! :D
until Tuesday…
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