Learning Letter/Plan of Action

During the course of this class, I have altered my idea about the reality of what life can be like for kids growing up in war torn or underdeveloped countries.  It was a subject that I have never really put any thought into because it simply did not affect me.  I have the "out of sight, out of mind" mentality.  While I do not have issue with this way of thinking, it can turn into ignorance or just "looking the other way".  After this course, I feel that I fall into the "looking the other way" category.  I know that a lot of this is happening around the world but it doesn't directly affect me, so I don't really pay attention to it.  While reading about all of these kids growing up in different circumstances, I realized that every kid grows up and all of these stories were coming of age stories, but from different and horrible perspectives.  It is odd to see that with their situations, they still had to deal with some of the same issues of growing up.  I feel that this connection between all the books was the most important aspect in my opinion.

While doing the projects, my favorite aspect was seeing others projects and how they did them.  With the Museum display, it was interesting to see what others did.  I noticed that a lot of people had family and religion as the main aspect of their displays.  This is something that I find interesting because I am detached from my family and non-religious.  Seeing how different people portray their family is something that is always of interest to me.  The part that I most remember is reading about a girl's father who was adopted and went on an expedition to find his birth parents.  Being adopted, I hear this all the time and get asked if I am ever going to find my birth parents.  To me, it makes no sense as i have no want to even think about it, they aren't my parents.  That is not how others feel, as I saw with this father looking for his birth parents.  I wanted to know why he wanted to do it, just to get insight into what drives someone who is adopted to do this.

I enjoyed the Book Talks project more than I expected.  When I have to work with five or more people, I cringe.  I am generally a solo worker, yet I had a great group who came up with great ideas and books to use.  I never thought of single parenting as issues with children's books.  I knew that single parent families are a huge issue in the US and the statistics that I found were quite depressing.  The ones who suffer are the children.  Seeing how many books there are on single parenting, I realized that I had seen these books before and didn't even notice that they were about the topic.  I think it is because single parenting is a normality in today's society and I don't even recognize it as being anything but normal.  While the amount of books was overwhelming, the ideas behind each was interesting.  I was really surprised by the topic of sibling abuse and the lack of content that the group could find.  While they were able to find material about it, it was surprising because it is an issue that we all know but maybe don't recognize as an issue that needs real attention.  The most important concept that I pulled from this activity was that there is a children's book for almost any situation.

While doing the Graffiti Wall, I enjoyed looking through all of the different types of graffiti.  There is so much out there and was very hard to choose from.  Like art, each piece that I found was meant to be thought provoking and something that went against the grain.  Seeing different types of resistance art showed that there is a commonality in all of these wars; the resistance and some people want the same thing, peace.

I feel that the main point of all the texts that we read was to get perspectives of growing children in very different settings.  Each kid had his or her own horror to deal with as they were growing up.  I imagine that students could read these novels to get an idea of what it is like for others around the world to grow up when they don't have certain amenities that we do.  War and strife is going to continue in the world, providing us with more of these horror stories of what children have to go through.  It was hard for me to believe that Sierra Leone's government was also using child soldiers.  I was under the impression that the rebels and the RUF were the ones that used them, but it was both sides.  I've always known that there is war and it destroys societies and peoples, but I never looked into or thought about what it actually does to the children.  These books have created a much more focus about people in these large scale situations.  Thinking about war in terms makes it much more personal as it isn't about the resources or land but individual's experiences with life and death every day.

As a person, I don't ever really think about myself as part of a bigger picture or responsible for something that happens half way across the world.  I do things for myself.  I am not selfish, just choose to live in my own world.  Is that good or bad? I don't know.  How much could I change if I got involved anyway?  I don't vote or get involved in politics.  I feel as if I am a bystander.  When looking through pictures of graffiti, I saw one that said "no one is an innocent bystander".  I found this to be really interesting.  I know about all of these things happening around the world but don't do anything about it.  Does that make me part of the problem if I just ignore it?  I could answer both ways.  I also ask myself what I could do that would even matter.  This class has lowered my ignorance level to some of the situations around the world and it makes it difficult to ignore them.  Not that I want to ignore them, but knowing more about what is happening makes me feel bad for doing so, which is a good thing and means I have empathy, so I am not a serial killer.

For my plan of action, I have thought and thought about what I would like to do for this portion of the assignment.  Figuring out a step to take from here is not easy and I won't settle with just increasing my own knowledge of the subject as I feel it is a bit of a cop out.  I chose a point to focus on in the course and go from there, which is parenting and issues that revolve around it from book talks.  In my student teaching, I have built great relationships with students yet neglected to do anything with parents.  It is easy to forget them as they are "out of sight and out of mind" for me as a teacher.  With my school placement, there is a very high amount of poverty and students that have to work to support their families.  As I resume student teaching in the fall, I am going to be involved more with parents from the start.  I want to create relationships with them too.  This is something that teachers must do anyway and I want to do it to better the relationships that I have with the students.  I am an advocate that better relationships promote better learning, so it should be a no brainier that involving parents is something I should be doing.  I never had to deal with personal parenting issues with my family, so I tend to forget that they can be issues.  Involving parents and getting to know them and strengthening the relationship because of it is my goal of what I would like to accomplish next as I progress towards teaching.

Graffiti Wall

The pieces of art that I have chosen are from an artist named Bansky, who is well known for his graffiti art in Europe.  While Bansky has many different types of art, I chose three that I believe have powerful and ambiguous messages.  When I think of the definition of graffiti, I think of illegal wall art first and secondly that it is the opposition to propaganda.  I see it as resistance to propaganda and propaganda in itself for that reason.  The pieces of artwork that I chose are ones that caught my attention.  All but the last are making fun of something in popular culture.  While the last one may not be making fun of anything, the addition of people’s hand prints alter the original meaning of the photo to make it into something very different than the intended purpose.

The first piece of art that I chose was one that has two beloved American characters yet is deeply disturbing once we see what is happening with the person who Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse are holding hands with.  The piece shows what looks like Ronald and Mickey holding hands with a small child as they walk.  Ronald and Mickey look happy but the boy looks completely horrified.  At first, I did not notice the horrified look on the boy, which I think is supposed to be the point of the piece of art.  To me, this photo represents the age of Disney and fast food carrying kids into a whole different world than what they lived in before these institutions were around.  These kids also have no choice if they want to follow along or not, Disney and Ronald are ushering them into their future whether they like it or not.  The message that I derived from this is that the future will carry us forward, whether or not we want and even if we kick and scream in protest.  What looks like fun and happiness on the outside or at first glance can be horror to those involved, like the child in the middle. 

The next piece that I chose depicts the Jungle Book characters bounded and blindfolded in a deforested area waiting for an axe man to do something.  When I first looked at this, I saw two different stories.  The first was that the axe man was just finished cutting down all of the trees, and all that was left was to kill the inhabitants.  This message seems even more powerful as the artist uses beloved Disney characters and not real forest animals that have to deal with extinction due to habitat loss.  Using Disney characters makes it much more of a sensitive subject because we all know and love Mowgli and his band of forest friends, so seeing him face the butcher creates more emotions that just seeing real animals that we have no connection with.  The other scenario that I saw was that the Disney characters were about to be executed for what they did to the forest.  While I have not read the Jungle Book in a long time, I remember the jungle being burnt down at the end.  I may be completely wrong, but it was all the fighting that caused its destruction.  Now the characters are facing the music as they must answer for what they have done.  With either viewing, there is a message in both that points out what deforestation does.  Either innocent bystanders are felled along with the forest or they are the cause.  In both scenarios they have to meet the same fate as the forest.  I found this piece to be depressing as it shows deforestation involving something so innocent with something so devastating.

The last piece is one that I chose because I think that it started as one idea and turned into something completely different as it was altered by time and peoples hand prints.  The piece depicts a girl or boy reaching for a balloon that is out of his or her grasp.  The wall that this is painted on has become deteriorated and the face, part of the legs and the feet are missing.  The art could very well be drawn this way, but it really looks like the wall has deteriorated after the art was applied.  The missing pieces of wall make the child an ambiguous sex and a child without a face.  The part that really caught my eye was the mud hand prints on the wall in between the child’s reaching arm and the floating balloon.  All of the hand prints (and a few footprints) that are on it are in between.  I do not know what the significance of all of these hand prints means to whoever did it.  I imagine that the floating balloon is the loss of innocence in children and the hand prints are done by people who recognize the plight of trying to hold on to something that is unreachable.