HUM 221: '06 reflective essays

Notes on the reflective essays embedded in the final exam ... jotted down while I was grading the papers and written up in the airplane over southeast Alaska on the flight into Anchorage on May 5. More-or-less unedited.

Historical context. My notes say, "They're getting the survival of Native culture, not as much 20th-century social dislocation (diabetes, chemical dependency, poverty, etc.) though ..." I think the first part of the course could be more of a broad cultural and historical overview, maybe lumping Northeast, Southeast (and Athabascan?) cultures together as Woodland, and touching on distinctions of the Plains, Southwestern and Pacific Coast cultures ... but with more emphasis on SW and Pacific NW artistic conventions ... then moving from the overview to intertribal forms, activism and cultural survival, "Native Pride," powwows, music, cedar flute, literature and postcolonial themes, etc. Do this in context of contact-conflict-separation-assimilation-trival renewal paradigm, in other words give it more of a historical context.

Reader response. A good experiment, especially for one that just sort of happened without planning in the middle of the semester when nothing else was working, and one worth developing more consciously next year. (I've got a strong hunch reader response is a good way of getting into cross-cultural issues. There's a multicultural website on "the expanding canon" for high school lit teachers, featuring selected works by Ishmael Reed and Graciela Limón, that looks promising.) Needs more planning tho' ... along with just about everything else in HUM 221 ... replace research paper with a set of reader response essays? Needs more backgrounding, tho' ... the Reed-Limón website says:

In the classroom, a cultural studies approach usually combines literary readings with social and historical analysis. By reading texts in this way, students achieve a deeper understanding of how historical circumstances, social traditions, and the media work together to create a cultural milieu in which certain sets of beliefs are either reinforced or questioned. When the right texts are brought together, students can begin to see literature as a social product with a specific history and a particular agenda.

Should work for Native American studies, too. The website is well worth studying.

Scheduling and technology. The class needs to be Tuesday-Thursday, so we have enough time to screen videos. A lot of my problems this semester were technological, and the fix can be technological, too. The blog showed promise, both in terms of linking readings -- an important matter in a course there's no handy-dandy textbook for -- and giving out assignments, elaborating on them. Moving to the Presidents Room is going to require me to do more with media.

Masks!!! Our brief treatment of Haudenosaunee practice and attitudes on the use of masks in healing, false face society and ban on use of masks for non-religious purposes was mentioned by more students than anything else, including kids who didn't make a whole lot of effort the entire semester. Can do more with it, use it next time to show resistance to commodification, introduce that issue along with expropriation. Contrast it to Cherokee attitude on masks, Northwest Coast masks and attitudes on intellectual property.

On the whole, I'd give myself about a C+ the first time out.