Ethnography Project Reflection

My groups Ethnography project was about literacies found in objects around campus. 

I think it was difficult to find objects around campus that could be connected back to literacy without overlapping with what other groups were trying to do (at least I thought so). However, I think we did a good job finding a collection of literacies that not only represent the university but represent the ideas we discussed as a class about what literacy is. First we met up and walked around campus taking pictures of different objects we saw that could represent literacy. We then posted them to a google doc and narrowed down our objects to about 4. I think using the google doc made it a lot easier to communicate as a group and build our project without physically being together. I liked working with my group because they came up with a lot of unique ideas about what defines literacy and brought a new prospective into the project that I didn't originally have. The actual formation of how to present our project was little difficult because of how broad our topic was. What objects have literacy? What are we defining as literacy? Our final project let the viewer of our video sort of define what we found in their own way, which I loved. I think trying to translate something that would normally be an essay into an untraditional piece was interesting as well as thought provoking and pushed us to think outside the box presentation wise. I'm really proud of the work my group members put into this project and think it turned out really well. Our goal was to get our peers thinking about hidden literacies and their meaning and I think we did just that! 

Oct 25 Literacy Mapping

Since I've missed quite a few blog post's I've had to go back and make up what I've missed.
The first blog post that I missed was the one about the Literacy Mapping Mini Assignment we did around campus.
For my assignment I chose to sit outside of Woodward. I chose to listen to the different types of music people play from their cars as they drove by. This is actually something I noticed one day while I was waiting for one of my classes to begin. A lot of students like to play their music loud as they cruise around campus and so I decided to begin listening.
Music is a huge part of literacy in my opinion; in fact I think it's the most common form of literacy used by people. Everyone listens to music. What kind of music you listen to can change your mood, or tell someone something about you. You can communicate with other people through music. Music is everywhere and used for everything.
As I sat and listened to the music people chose to play, I heard a lot of different stuff. A girl in a truck playing country music, a guy in a sports car playing mainstream radio, another girl was listening to some kind of foreign music, and one guy was blasting Nirvana.
All of this just got me thinking about how much of an impact music has on our lives and how huge of a form of literacy it is.

Fieldwork Mini Assignment

Our group chose to meet by the Belk Tower and walk around campus to discover different objects that hold literacy for our fieldwork.

The first object we looked at was the Belk Tower. We talked about how the tower is used by students to post news about events happening around campus (I've noticed a lot of Greek ads and such by the tower). We also talked about how the tower isn't just a bell tower, but also a piece of art as it is supposed to represent a fountain pen and ink bottle. 

After the tower we walked around some of the art buildings and found what seemed to be a blacksmith shop. Then we wandered into the gardens and found a memorial for Bonnie E. Cone and a rock that some students chose to graffiti. Further into the gardens we found a shack that also had some interesting  graffiti markings inside it. We then went back to main campus towards the Echo Circle, which was really interesting for me because I had no idea what the 'echo circle' was. After that we wandered through SAC and looked at some bulletin boards and other more obvious forms of literacy. 

In conclusion, we found a lot of different objects around campus that could encompass the idea of 'literacy'. 

Literacy Narrative Reflection

Choosing what topic to write my literacy narrative about was pretty easy for me. I've always been drawn language and the differences between my language and other languages. So when it came time to pick a topic for this paper, the first thing I thought of was my connection to language and how that is , in return, connected to literacy and my perception of it. For the past four years I have been taking German, and I can honestly say that my love for that language has opened so many doors for me. It was completely obvious that this was the perfect topic for my literacy narrative. In fact, all of my notecard ideas had some kind of connection to language. I decided to start with a memory I had about talking to my host mother during my stay in Germany back in 2009. This was the base for my literacy narrative and I built on it by adding connections between my experiences and the reading 'Mother Tongue'. My first draft was a solid piece that covered all of the basics of an essay that I learned in high school. I had an intro, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. But that format didn't seem to completely fit my topic the way I wanted it to. In my second draft, I tried a more relaxed approach and voice. I feel like it worked well, but I'm not use to writing in that style so it was a little uncomfortable. My final draft was a good mix of both the first and second. I think I completed my editing goals by trying something different. I figured out that for me, it is easier to write in a more structured way, but that that approach doesn't always return the best product. Writing and revising this paper helped me see that it is ok to try new styles of writing and that sometimes that can be the best thing to do. In the future if I feel that a particular piece of writing is too bland I think I will refer back to this and maybe just switch it up completely just to see what would come of it. I think revising in this way also helped me stay away from writers block because I wasn't concentrating on my writing being a particular way.