Hello everyone!

So, I am one of the last class bloggers! That is the reason I sat on my chair with a notepad and a pen and opened every student’s blog, taking notes of the general topic this week and the similarities and disagreements between us. A lot of my fellow class mates this week talked about “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and had their own different approach to analyse the text. To name a few, Nicola analysed the ‘romantic story-line’ of the text, whereas Jacqueline initially criticized the “dramatic monologue” and later discussed about how she reconsidered that after reading Morey’s article. Kihan also mentioned about dramatic monologue of the novel but in her opinion the novel can be read as a more general representation of the immigrant experience in a post-9/11 world. I must say that it was really interesting to see how we all have our own different way of analyzing the same text we read and discuss together. But in my “official” last blog I want to focus on one thing that we all agree on and something that was the highlight of this week’s posts – What did we learn from this course that is going to help us for the rest of our lives?

We all will agree that ASTU class has been a class where we all learnt many things that is going to be useful and helpful for the rest of our lives. Mariana described it in beautiful three words, ASTU class has been a “thought-provoking adventure”. I couldn’t agree more, it surely was an adventurous journey in search of those “aha” moments that made this whole journey as Mariana puts it a “source of inspiration and curiosity” and just like every other journey, in this journey of transition from high school to college as Deigo mentioned in his blogs, we made mistakes, we learnt from our mistakes, we improved and now we are moving forward.

Peija, Nicolo and Kristen talked about how ASTU class had helped us with our University essays for all other courses and that is definitely something which will help us during out entire University journey. Peija also mentioned about how she developed the skill of reading scholarly essays quickly and efficiently which helped her incredibly in her research process for all her courses. I would also like to mention about the awesome letter Carolina wrote to Dr Luger because I am sure each one of us can completely relate to that ( I loved the drafting emails part. I thought I was the only one who did that ).

Anyway, what was common in everyone’s blogs was the mention of how our perspective towards looking and analyzing things have changed and how the whole experience of the ASTU class has been “eye-opening” as Nicolo quotes it. Throughout the year, we were always told to write essays and properly cite sources but how to do it was something we learnt in ASTU class. 

Even though Carolina has thanked Dr. Luger through her wonderful letter. On behalf of the whole class, I would like to thank her for always being so helpful, keeping the class engaging through activities of all kinds, from dramatization of The Reluctant Fundamentalist to making us read the poem together as a class, from making us listen to the actual writers and poets recite their own work to showing us videos of the how scholars present their research work.

It has truly been a great learning experience. We might forget the stories we read but we will never forget what we learnt.

So I guess it’s a wrap!

Good luck for the upcoming essays and finals!

Hello Class!

The visit to the Rare Books and Special Collections library was the topic of discussion for this week’s blogs. The class blogs were supposed to be about sharing the experience of our class field trip to the Rare Books and Special collection library at Irvin K Barber Library where we analyzed Joy Kogwa’s fond. Even though it was a field trip and we went there as a class, it was interesting to see how everyone learnt something different and had their own ‘individual’ experience despite of the whole experience being shared ‘collectively’ by the class.

Deigo’s usage of the term ‘forgetting as humiliated silence was attention-grabbing. He also made a bold statement about the ignorance of the ‘traumatic’ Japanese- Canadian’s history by the Canadian schools in reference to that term. Deigo’s opinions shared a common ground with Rachael, as she also feels the importance of educating students about the history of Japanese Canadians in order to preserve this important historical struggle. I could relate a lot to Mariana’s blog as the ‘shady’ history of Canada was shocking for international students like us. We were only aware about the existence of ‘multiculturalism’ of Canada but little did we know about its traumatic history. While all these blogs focused on the ignorance of the history of Japanese Canadians, other blogs focused more on the experience of analyzing the Joy Kogwa’s fond and their ‘individual’ views about her fond.

Kaveel in his blog, referred his experience of being able to analyze ‘primary’ sources for the first time as ‘eye-opening’. He also shared pictures of various artifacts which was stimulating especially the brainstorming sheet titled ‘’SOME RANDOM THOUGHTS FROM A NOVEL IN PROGRESS” which was compared to a scholarly article by Kaveel comprising of arguments, knowledge deficit and contribution to the larger argument.  Carolina expresses her disappointment at  Joy Kogwa’s fond, providing more information about the author’s work and not the author. I also appreciate how she got inspired by the field trip and decided to personalize her blog that represents the ‘real’ her and shared a picture of her bulletin board (I personally loved it, check it out!).

Overall everyone did a great job on their blogs and I found all of them really thought-provoking. The blog posts this week were good end for this semester.

Good luck on the short essay and the finals!

See you all next semester!

-Priya