Final Reflection Willa

Final Reflection
Willa

I have greatly enjoyed the last quarter working with this project not just because it is my area of academic interest, but also because of the experiences I have had working with the women and the children. Originally, I expected to work with the adults more than the children, but this quarter I only helped out with the adult digital literacy once or twice. Understanding the needs of children is much more complex than I thought I would be assisting with. I know what it is to be influenced by the adults in one's life when young. When I am working with the kids, I want to purposeful in what language I use and how I express myself especially because the children are mostly female and of an ethnic minority. In being careful with what I say, I also wanted to make sure that the applications that we downloaded for the iPads would reflect the same type of conscientiousness. Empowering female leaders and the use of technology in child development are my two themes that I will address here. 

Teaching women from childhood that they are valuable on their own without the right things, clothing, appearance, etc is an important part of the feminist construct that we have been employing in our project. I realized the first time that I work with the girls that I would need to be careful. I was using a brown marker on the whiteboard and one of the girls told me that she didn't want me using that color because it was the color of poop, which of course is also the color of her skin. I spent some time to explain that brown is not a bad color and there are plenty of things that are brown that are good (chocolate being the main one) and explaining that other colors also can be gross too (like red is the color of blood or that zits are white, etc). I have previously done a lot of thinking about how my words can influence others, but working the children has reminded me to think of it more and be even more aware of my words. Furthermore, I need to be conscious of how I speak  to myself. When things are rough at school I have a tendency to call myself stupid and attribute any academic success to luck or privilege rather than granting myself and owning my intelligence. 

I was in part in charge of deciding what applications to download on the iPads, which was mostly simple in choosing the educational applications for math and science because these are usually divorced from any social context. However, I have been increasingly cautious with what applications I would like to download in the realm of history and literature. I am aware that history is written by the dominant culture, which are more often than not, the oppressors and the victors. History can vilify and misconstrue events of the past. The only application that we have downloaded that has a history component was recommend by the children because they used it in class. After watching them use it and seeing the content, I thought it was fairly inclusive in alternative narratives. We also put other restrictions on the iPads. Only we can download applications and there are maturity rating restrictions (as determined by Apple). We do not believe that any of the children would purposefully seek out inappropriate materials, but we did not want them to stumbled upon it on accident. In one manner, we are acting as protective censors, which is something that I think a lot of adults do for their children. However, as I recently discovered I am an adult. I no longer have an adult censor and I have been reminded this quarter that it is okay and necessary to censor certain information for your own protection. I use the social media site Tumblr, which has an extension that allows me to censor certain tags. I have started to use these tags to censor disturbing information. I have come to believe that there is line between being informed and being overwhelmed. 

There is a multitude of themes that I got to explore this quarter that I do not have time to address in this format. However, I am looking forward to continue to work with the women and the children next quarter. I want to continue to be a positive influence and working, step by step, to affecting change. Good things can come from women who believe in themselves and have access to a positive narrative about themselves and their cultures.