Round-up Reflection

For me, this blog post represented the first indicator of things to come in this class, and the first artifact which documents the evolution of my understanding of rhetoric, writing, and identity.  I was surprised by the unconventional way Lil, as a professor, addressed the class so openly and frankly.  In her "Who am I Bringing to Class?" piece, she immediately challenged the way I thought about identity and rhetoric-- what constitutes a professor's rhetoric versus that of a student or a friend?  How "safe" of an environment is a writing or English classroom, anyway?  That is a question we discussed several times over the course of this class. 

In composing my own "Who am I Bringing to This Class?", I was able to work through some of the conflicting pre-existing notions I had about the nature of identity.  The changes I made from my initial draft to my final are significant, which I feel represents the transformation of the concept of identity-- much more fluid, for one thing, than I originally thought-- in my conceptions of it.  By writing that I am a WIP (work in progress), I was able to come to terms with the fact that I perform different positional identities at different times and am still beginning to take on new positional identities-- I'm a work in progress.  This reflection was vital to my understanding in this class. 

Initially, I struggled somewhat with the Holland and Gee readings and their more theoretical aspects.  Reading blog annotations by those who obviously understood them a little better (such as this one by Kerri Bright Flinchbaugh) helped me a great deal-- in addition, I learned to love using Jing! 

One program I had already learned to love is Pinterest.  As a certifiable Pinterest addict, I was really able to use my inquiry project and critical narrative boards as a way to bring my ideas visually and conceptually together.  Checking out others' boards was interesting as well, because the boards seem to give a unique perspective on how we are approaching the sites and cultures of our inquiry projects.  This is my Inquiry Project board, but I also went crazy pinning images and quotes about Lorde for my critical narrative project.

My critical narrative on Lorde (subtitled Rhetoric of a "Real" Pop Idol) was one of the crucial processes which really helped me to understand rhetoric and performance of identity "in motion".  Curating different perspectives on and representations of Lorde was fascinating, and I was really satisfied with the final product.

  I found all of the critical narrative projects, creative and visually-oriented as they were, to be particularly fascinating and really applaud the whole class on what a great job everyone did.  My group member and fellow Hannah, Hannah Mayfield, 's critical narrative takes the cake as my absolute favorite, though.  Her exploration of fandom culture and society's perceptions of fandom in this beautiful Prezi through images and dialogue really blew me away.

Of the books we read for class, I was definitely most intrigued by Matt Wray's Not Quite White.  As a history major who has studied the history of the Old and New South and that of the Carolinas, I was able to make many connections between our modern concept of "white trash" and the identities of the backcountry farmers who I have studied and written papers on for my history department classes.

When writing and editing my final inquiry paper, I was fortunate to get a lot of excellent input from my group members, Hannah and Zachary, as well as from Lil.  My group members were invaluable for this class!

What did I learn from this class?  That we are in the midst of a life-long identity crisis.

What I mean by that is that we are constantly performing and adjusting our identities to our current situation.  Identity is a fluid concept-- the metaphor of different water pouring over the same waterfall, from the TED TALKS video we watched in our second class, comes to mind.  I have really enjoyed the creative opportunities and thought-provoking, eye-opening discussion facilitated in ENGL 4273, and can only hope that some time in the rest of my college career I will get to take a class I will enjoy half as much.