Final Course Reflection - Brad

Brad Holland

Final Reflection

            The rise of information technology must be accompanied by a push for ­­evaluation on its uses and accompanying societal consequences. As an educator and peer participating in the Community Technology Literacy & You project, I must regularly stop and reflect on community informatics topics including digital divides and identity within communities. Over the course of the last ten weeks, these are the two topics that I found myself reflecting upon most. Likewise, I was consciously aware of them during classroom discussion and community service learning.  

            In a society that is rapidly becoming more dependent on technology, there exists a digital divide between people with tech-prowess and those without. This division has an important role in determining the economic and social position of people in developed nations such as America, where most white-collar jobs require rudimentary computing skills. The digital divide is strikingly similar to the cycle of poverty. People who are digitally literate can use information technology as a tool to gain further knowledge, advancing themselves economically, intellectually, and technologically further ahead of the digitally illiterate. The digital divide is apparent to me during my daily life when I interact with people of different generations. Older generations that did not grow up using information technology have a much more difficult time understanding the potential of technologies such as the internet, mobile computing, and social networks. People like my parents often ask me questions that I simply Google to provide an answer. My first reaction when encountering a problem is to look it up online, whereas they usually ask their immediate peers for information. To take it one step further, my parents’ parents would most likely would have scoffed at the idea of an internet search, because their generation is even less digitally literate and cannot comprehend the scope of online information. I feel it is important for the digitally literate to help teach and encourage those who lack similar skills; digital literacy opens up a whole new world of information and opportunity.

            This course’s focus on identity made me think about how I perceive myself within the mix of thousands of individuals that I interact with on a daily basis. There exist countless forces in the world that try and sculpt or mold our characteristics using outward social pressures. It requires immense strength to be an individual and think freely. How we perceive ourselves affects how we interact with others. This became important during our workshop sessions, because we as volunteers were not present to simply instruct from a top-down hierarchy. The bi-directional learning goals of this course required us to perceive ourselves as community members on the same plane as the women in our workshops. This train of thought is radically different from my other university courses, and is especially liberating when I began to consider the inclusiveness of our efforts.

            Our workshop sessions were not the only inclusive community in this course. Thanks to a welcoming classroom environment, my classmates, instructor and I felt comfortable discussing personal matters as they relate to our cohesiveness as a group. I can confidently say that I am comfortable with my identity among these people, which allows for more wholesome and meaningful interaction. There are countless things we can learn from each other if we allow our individuality to flourish and use technology to support the communication process. This course is certainly a step in the right direction, but we have much more work to do.

A Letter to my Feet

Dear Feet,
I do not tell you enough how much I appreciate you. You are my main mode of transportation, getting me from one place to another everyday.
I know I don't take very good care of you. I subject you to hard, flat and or tight shoes, or run barefoot down gravel paths and you've always stuck with me. I've strapped you to a board and you've carried me down mountains, and I've squeezed you into tight climbing shoes and you've balanced me on the tiniest projections as I climb up fake mountains. You've balanced me in tree pose, half moon pose and warrior III. You've marched with me for social change.
You do so much for me. I don't want to say that I can't live without you- that would erase the experiences of those who don't have feet and live just fine. I will say that without you, my world would be different; our built environment is definitely built for the able-bodied.
I wish I could say that I promise to take better care of you in full honesty, but I will try. Especially you, lefty- I know the tattoo hurt, and you deserve for it to stay beautiful.
Thank you for all you do, I appreciate you.
Love

DATE Reflection #2 TIffany

As I read this week, some things jump out at me as I think about my past experience with teaching bilingual learners in my own community.  The article on Critical Constructivism highlighted the "value of knowledge traditionally dismissed by academics".  I thought about a very objectivist approach to education adopted by our local schools in which English is demanded in all activities.  They do not value the second language of our students and believe it gets in the way of their progress.  How can this be when most of the world speaks more than one language?  Both the language used at school and the language used at home are important to the whole person.

Also I read about a woman working in Haiti who was more interested in the specific goal of helping women learn to make money by teaching them to use computers.  "We do not use computers for fun..." she said, as if that meant her classes were of great importance.  I think fun can be just as important as finding a job, or getting health information or learning to use e-mail.  I think having fun can foster the very best kind of learning.

Finally, the article on Critical Constructivism helped me to put my finger on one of the most important parts of gathering information from participants. "Respect for subjugated knowledge can lead to expected responses rather than authentic responses."  What this means to me is that if people have the impression that certain answers are the "right" answers because those individuals have a higher level of educational experience, they may be afraid to be themselves and communicate in a way that is not real for them.  "Real" is always the best kind of information - no matter who gives the information - no matter what language - whether it is a stay at home Mom or a business woman - a girl or a teacher.

11/19/14 Reflection Ivette

The past couple of weeks have been invigorating, personally, emotionally and intellectually.  Attending the ASIST conference, returning to the home of my childhood and revisiting so many places that shaped my formation and then wisking off to the island of Puerto Rico to attend the National Women Studies conference.  Ideas of community, collaboration and connection take very different forms in each of those spaces, but I am at ease knowing that at the center of the work we do is love.

As I was preparing for our roundtable, on Hormigas y Hormigueros: Resisting assimilation, silencing and erasure the questions that we were posed with reflecting on were the following:  How do we envision nation state? What are our processes of dialogue, collective?  How do we weave in new ways of imaging the nation?

With this my colleague, Miriam Valdovinos set the stage for the conversation, one in community, in circle, with ancestral knowledges of healing at the center.

When it came my time, I was at first speaking Freire and the 6 elements he refers to as essential to dialogue across differences: love, humility, hope, faith in human kind, and critical thinking.  The same ones that are at the center of the framework we are using with our work in the Empezando Donde Estamos/ Starting Where We are project.

Sharing stories, creating spaces for our counter stories, on the individual, family, institutional and academic identities is the way we can embody envisioning a different nation-state.  Hooks reminds us that "love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust." 

In this work, as we prepare for our first workshop today, we bring with us this kind of love that creates a space for dialogue.  One that, as Tiffany reminds us in her reflections, and in the readings include and embody a constructivist learning/assessment atmosphere and one that is rooted in the lived experiences and shared community already established and the new one we are creating. 

In the foreword to the 1990 edition of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Richard Shaull writes "our advanced technological society is rapidly making objects of most of us and subtly programming us into conformity to the logic of its system.  To the degree which this happens we are also becoming submerges in a 'new culture of silence'."

His words resonate because as scholars, educators and information professionals, we need to be aware of socio-technical systems and how our work is in dialogue with these systems which can and often are oppressive and exploitative. 

"Being oppressed is the absence of choices" hooks says, so as we move forward with the women's workshops, let's keep that notion, front and center.  Our goals are multiple but all rooted in the idea that we are creating spaces for choices, opportunities, expanding of information networks and people as resources. 

I am working on today's lesson plans for the women, and given Emily's email regarding the technology, the last few weeks, each of your reflections and my own, I am leaning towards a lesson plan that allows us to enter in dialogue with the women, engage in storytelling, lay the foundation for how and whats we are trying to do, share resources about FemTechNet as a way of thinking about technology, and create a space for allies and partners in this journey that we know so well, we cannot do alone.  We will let them know that for each of our lessons, we need a volunteer leader, to sign up and partner with us on the topic.  I believe if we want this to be a space for dialogue, it is essential that we start by making that space, by demonstrating the importance of that dialogue and being willing to share our stories and be vulnerable in the process.  

With love,

~Ivette

Comments on Tess and Ivette's Posts

I don't know if it's kosher to comment on other's posts, but I was thinking about Tess's comments on intersectionality as relating to what we talked about in the Mujeres Sin Fronteras meeting about moving outside of our comfort zone and widening our circle of comfort. Tess mentioned that working within two cultures can feel like going down a river with one foot in each of two canoes. But can the the "problem" be reframed? In one way, when you step into a new culture and begin to develop as a person in that culture you are blowing open your circle of comfort and becoming a more versatile, expansive person. The metaphor that comes into my head is the idea of a house. When I was younger and only knew how to operate in one culture (or even 1 subculture, if we think of, say, High School), it was like I was living in a house, but I never left my bedroom. Gradually, as I was exposed to different cultures and began to see how I changed as a person when I was immersed in that culture, and accepted that the way I acted in that culture, though different, was "me" too, my 'self' got a whole new room! Welcome to the den, sit down and stay a while! I think it's easier for me to think about it in this way, though, because these cultures were not necessarily in conflict with one another, so I never felt like I was betraying my loyalty to any group by immersing myself in another group and taking on their mores, styles, attitudes, etc. 

10/1/14 Reflection Tess

After our second class session, I had the concept of intersectionality on the brain. I suppose it was partially due to the reading and the small activity from that week, but it was also because of the Multicultural Resources for Youth class I'm taking this quarter. I feel that this concept has been a constant occurrence in a majority of the classes I have taken throughout my college career (mostly because my English lit classes all had a theoretical focus), which really just means I have had a lot of time to reflect on its importance.

There are a lot of pieces that come together to create the blob that is my identity, and each one has its own purpose. Sometimes this thing happens when you're away from your culture long enough: you start to see that you're forming different identities because you're spending so much time in a different world. At least that's kind of been the case with me since I've been away from the Rez a majority of the time for the past seven years. In one of his books (I believe it was "Reservation Blues"), Sherman Alexie said that being a Native person living in modern Western society is like trying to drift down a river with a foot in two different canoes. Granted that is rather cheesy, I feel that it's also a true statement. When a person has so many identities but they don't know how to fit them together, they may feel obligated or forced to sacrifice one identity for another. But this is where being able to understand the concept of intersectionality and being comfortable navigating identity is really handy. It's about finding a balance and knowing how to make all of the different parts work as one cohesive piece. Now that was about as cheesy a thing to say as Sherman Alexie's two canoes line, but no matter.