I hope you all had restful yet productive weekends. As I am sure most of you have noticed, I have yet to assign presentation groups for this week. Here's why: this week, we are going to try something a little different. Instead of presenting on articles in front of your classmates, we are going to have information circles. Here's what this will look like: each group will still do a close reading of an assigned article (assignments will be pasted below); however, instead of presenting together as a group, each group member will join a circle comprised of one group member of another presentation group. So, for this week there will be a total of 8 readings including the two that I overlooked last week (Rodriguez & Tan). I will cover these two articles, which leaves 6 remaining readings to be covered. Here are the reading assignments (note: I moved a few people around; these changes are just for this week):
Lam (2004), Border discourses...
Group:
DJ Campbell
Matt Williams
Remington Price
James Lubell
David Keys
Group:
Yoon Ju Lee
Rocio Sanchez
Yoojung Kwon
Isaiah Kang
Stephanie Chau
Pearson (2001), Life in the radical middle...
Group:
Vishal Baheti
David Song
Juyeon Baek
Shannon Hawari
Kathy Shen
Brumer (1998), Phoncis and politics...
Group:
Nicholas Piccinini
Joshua Tovar
Alister Meshkin
Soon-Chan Kim
Groups:
Laqshya Taneja
Sasha Rasmussen
Scott Sok
Tina Chen
Dorner, et al., (2007), I helped my mom...
Group:
Victor Sandifer
Jelani Dunn
Julia Heunis
Nancy Ledesma
Again, instead of presentations, we will form informational circles this week. Each circle will have an expert from each article so that all of the articles will be covered. More precisely, each group will feature one person who read Lam, one who read, Pratt, one who read Pearson, so on and so forth.
Looks good. Are we not doing the blog questions this week, or am i just not finding them?
ReplyDeleteThere are questions for Lam, Pearson, and Brumer, but not the other readings.
ReplyDeleteArts of the Contact Zone by Pratt
ReplyDeleteI will state my opinion on the contact zone and diversity in the following paragraph, but I was wondering if anyone agrees that contact zones are necessary for cultures to continue to grow?
Pratt defines a contact zone as “the space in which transculturation takes place – where two different cultures meet and inform each other, often in highly asymmetrical ways.” She tells us that the contact zone allows people to break cultural boundaries through interacting with people from other cultures. Through the contact zone, we can start to become more diverse. The contact zones gives the opportunity for one to interact with another culture. Once Pratt starts to describe the situation on courses at her university and tells us about the addition of a new course named “Culture, Ideas, and Values," they created a contact zone because of the diversity of students it attracts. Personally, I think the idea of the contact zone is beneficial to everybody. I believe if one person is raised within their own "contact" (race, ethnicity, culture) only then a bias is created towards one's own race. We will only know the positives of our own contact, but not the negatives. There are two sides to every story and in a culture or religion, you must know both to truly understand it. Overall, I believe for cultures or "contacts" to grow, they must be able to interact with other "contacts."