The year that I have spent in the CAP program has been quite the journey. All the instructors were very friendly and inviting. It made the transition from high school to university much less anxiety inducing since I was nervous about the spike in difficulty. To say the least, I had learned a lot this year
My time in ASTU has been very fun. In fact, it was so much more tolerable than high school English class. All my high school English classes combined pale in comparison to ASTU. I think what contributes to that is the fact that most of the stuff we learned in English class was repeated every year which became dull and uninteresting. However, in ASTU, right from day one, we started to learn about some cool topics; we learned new terminology such as modals; we looked at scholarly papers and journal articles; we wrote proposals and literary analysis instead of the boring five paragraph essay; we even learned how to correctly make a bibliography. Back in high school I was just told leave the bibliography making to easy-bib, so when easy bib cited something wrong I didn’t understand, nor did I care enough to understand what was wrong.
Looking at some of the texts and videos we’ve been watching, such as American Sniper, I’ve been taught to look at what other scholars have been saying about what they think is important. This was already such a huge upgrade from the old high school system. One specific scholar we looked at was Judith Butler and her idea of ‘grievability’. Using such lens to look at texts in different ways was pretty novel. That’s something I’d expect to come out of a history class, although this IS ‘global citizens’ so it would make sense. In fact, all the class in the CAP program can be tied to one another. In Soci class, we talked about Neo-liberalism, a term that was discussed in Poli Sci class last semester. This first year in the CAP program has really taught me how to look at texts more critically. I had watched the movie ‘Downfall’ last year for a history class, and looking back on it, I think of the scenes much more differently like recognizing that ‘oh this scene relates to Butler’s idea of grievability’.
The CAP program really does help with the introduction to university life. However, I do wish that high school would do a better job of preparing students for high school. During ASTU classes sometimes I wondered of what was spoken was even English, such as ‘modals’. That was the very first time I had even heard of that word and I thought to myself ‘wow that sounds complicated’. I do appreciate the work the instructors put into teaching the classes and the effort to help us become ‘true scholars’.

In my ASTU class, we have begun to start our poetry unit. We were given four poems to read, and we are now currently reading ‘this connection of everyone with lungs’, a book of poems by Juliana Spahr. The poems we have read so far were quite depressing in nature as they have a shared theme of ‘war’, which coincides with our previous readings of ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’ and the Journal Article ‘Frames of War’ by Judith Butler. The first poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ was one that I recognized as it is a classic poem that is recited annually during Remembrance Day here in Canada. Other than that, the other three poems where completely new to me. It was quite interesting reading the other poems. Each poem had their own unique style and reason. One poem had the undertone of avenging fallen brethren instigating war propaganda whereas another poem critiqued the meaninglessness of dying for your country.

Poetry in secondary school was approached very similarly every year. It would be learning about poetry terms such as ‘oxymoron’ and ‘onomatopoeia’ and ‘metaphors’ along with types of poems such as sonnets and ballads and their rhythms which includes iambic pentameter, the most common type of poetic meter. After looking at some poems pulled up by the teacher we would then delve into the Shakespeare unit. In ASTU, the way we have approached poetry now has much more structure. Instead of learning about what was mentioned above, we now have a topic when it comes to looking at poems. When we annotate poems in class, instead of blindly looking for ‘oh this stanza is about so and so’s broken heart’, or ‘this is a metaphor for working’, we have an idea of what we should be looking for such as ‘this poem records individuality’.

We have also discussed the place poetry has in culture and politics. The obvious main point would be that poetry is a way of expressing yourself using words in a way to convey feeling that a normal sentence could not. Each culture has their own form poetry whether it be a traditional song or chant. It is meant to spread a particular objective. Poetry is used to move or persuade the reader, which would account for the use of poetry in politics. Poetry can be used as propaganda to spread an idea, such as the ‘In Flanders Field’, which spreads of the message of joining the war to avenge your fallen brethren. In fact, we learned that one of the poems on the list was banned due to it insinuating an idea the government didn’t want spread.

These few classes have been quite different than what we’ve been doing first term, which focused on graphic narratives. I say that poetry would is the opposite of graphic narratives, where words are used to express ideas rather than illustrations.

This recent blog assignment required our class to visit the Amazonia exhibit at MOA. This exhibit is only going to be at the museum for a limited time, and it also tied together nicely with what we were currently doing in our global citizen courses. Going to the museum was part of my list of things to do on campus, but I never had the chance to go until now.

When I got there, the side that I entered the exhibit from was the side that had the hammocks for museum patrons to lie in as well as walls decorated with artwork from elementary schools with the messages about being mindful of the environment, and recognizing that the environment is something that need to be protected. This ties in with the exhibit since not only was the exhibit showcasing the culture of the people who lived in the amazon rainforest, it was also to convey the message of the destruction of a group of people’s ways of life due to the modernization of mankind thought mining coal and deforestation. Along the back wall were the terrible facts of the acts of cruelty and injustices the people of the rainforest had to endure. Illegal deforestation along with invasion of land due to coal mining operations are some examples. Targeted assassinations of indigenous people were also common as well.

Aside from the cold, depressing part of the exhibit, the exhibit was very fascinating. The museum did an amazing job with displaying the various items of the indigenous people of the rainforest to even going as far as playing music to create the feeling that you were also in the rainforest. Animal noises and indigenous songs and instruments were played to create the feeling that you yourself were exploring the rainforest in person. They even had hammocks that you could lay in since the indigenous people used those to sleep in. The display cases housed many objects from toys and trinkets to weapons used for hunting and gathering. There were also masks and costumes and headdresses made from bird feathers used for special occasions. I noticed that the indigenous people of the amazon used quite a lot of bird feathers in their clothing since birds were very common in the rainforests and the amount of clothing that they wore was also extremely minimalistic compared to the clothing that their brethren wore here in Canada since the temperatures were considerably more warm and humid.

Out of all the exhibits showcased, the ones that made the biggest impression on me were the news articles from a few decades ago depicting the meeting between an electrical company and the indigenous people. In those articles were the picture of the meeting were one of the indigenous people caressed the face of one of the workers (or ‘slaps’ in one of the other articles). This was displayed to show the struggles the indigenous people suffered. This was also evident in the various backgrounds used by the museum when displaying objects within the cases. On display case had empty bullet shells as the background. This was to represent the mass genocide and invasions of land for military bases that happened. Another had coal as its background which was to represent the various coal mining operations that popped up all over the rainforest. With these displays, the exhibit tis trying to construct the message about how the modernizing world came and invaded this land and ruined the lives of many indigenous people living within the rainforest.

For the past 2 weeks In ASTU, we have been exposing ourselves to the genre of ‘the graphic narrative’, a graphic novel that is non-fiction (since novel means fiction), so we have started to read and analyzing the graphic narrative ‘Persepolis’ by Marjane Satrapi. The book Persepolis is about a 10 year old Marjane’s experience growing up in Iran during the Islamic revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, so in other words, this book is a graphic memoir.

I was familiar with the book as I have previously read this book before in my grade 11 year in high-school. It was on a bookshelf labelled ‘banned books’ alongside some other books. I asked my librarian what that meant, and she informed me that it means that the books on that bookcase were banned from other schools or libraries because some parents or people have deemed those books to be ‘unfit in a  library’ because of their ‘inappropriate’ or ‘controversial’ content and have ‘challenged’ them. ‘Challenging’ a book meant that anyone could make a claim against a book, and as long as they could argue their point and back it up with evidence, they could get that book successfully removed from a school or public library. Since that book wasn’t banned at my school, I was intrigued and decided to read it. It being a graphic novel (since I hadn’t known about the graphic narrative at the time) enticed me even more as graphic novels were my favourite genre right behind fantasy. Reading it back then, I never read deeply into the book, as I was reading it for it’s story and well illustrated characters. I never paid very much attention towards the deeper meaning of the book, but after reading it, I could definitely see why that the book could be considered ‘inappropriate’, such as bombing of civilians, death,   and the use of excessive violence.

Now that we are close reading this book in ASTU, reading it thought a second time with a much more analytical eye, I have noticed the details and symbolisms that escaped the mind my grade 11 counterpart, such as the big topics like faith, family, freedom and war. I start to see that the book that the book is less about what living in Iran in the 1980’s was like, but more as a the traumas and hardships of a young Iranian girl living in a dangerous environment. Satrapi makes great use of the graphic narrative, rather than a regular memoir to illustrate her experience living in Iran because she gives us an representation of it rather than explaining it. By using the graphic narrative, this gives her the power to control what we focus on, and allows her to use subtle details to enhance her points.

Over the course of my first three weeks in ASTU, they have been mainly spent on learning and examining the many aspects about how to write and present essays at a scholarly university level. Topics such as ‘genre’ has been one of the key cornerstones of the class so far, a topic that continues to resurface during discussions. For the most part, I had always thought of ‘genre’ to only be limited to the type of books located in your typical, traditional school or public library. Never had I thought that ‘genre’ could be expanded to encompass other topics outside the said typical library.

Genre, from what I have learned in this class, is made up of a one, very simple equation, situation plus form. The situation being the situation from which it arose from, and the form being the specific way it is written or represented. Being in that class has taught me the many specific ways that information and media can be presented and classified as in their own genre, such as the new genre that I am being exposed to left and right in University, the genre of the Scholarly essay. The essays that I have been reading in other classes, such as in Sociology class, all mainly documents written by other professional researchers and journalists, written with the intent of being read by other professors and students at the university level. Within these essays were the use of specialized words along with a very high level of vocabulary used, and most importantly of all, the integration of citation, which has the upmost importance in a scholarly essay. A situation and form unique to that specific genre.

However, genre doesn’t only come in a professionally written form, genre can be manifested from other sources as well. Kate Douglas, in her scholarly essay, describes the selfie genre that is extremely popular on social media with teenagers. I see other people’s selfies on Facebook and other social media sharing websites, and it is indeed another genre. After reading Kate Douglas’ essay, I have come to realize that a plethora of different types of genres exist in everyday life, such as the specific way the nutritions label must be displayed on the side of consumables or the way that advertisements are created to grab your attention. Truly, genre surrounds us everyday. but unless you really think about it you would never see it.

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