HOLA! readers, welcome to my blog!

In this first post I’d like to share some interesting connections I’ve found between my experiences in daily life and my ASTU 100A Course here at UBC.

During the last weeks we have analyzed Farhat Shahzad’s work, The Role of Interpretative Communities in Remembering and Learning, where she explains how “interpretative communities” like our social groups, family, religious communities, etc. have an important role on how we learn and remember things. The way she conducts her study shows us how influential technologies of memory and “human agents” can be (Wertsch, 2002). In this work she specifically focuses on how ninety-nine Canadian students remember The War on Terror.
I was surprised to see how much the background of each student played a role on how they saw that specific event and what they though about it. I feel like I became aware on how my opinion on certain things is affected by what I have been exposed to all my life.

After analyzing Shahzad’s study I thought of how news in media from my country, Mexico, reflect many aspects of our lives and how things can be different from one place to another.
The interesting part of this was searching for headlines from the most important news sites in Mexico and then compare them to the ones in Canada.
I came up with this idea when I saw the news on Hailey Dunbar-Blanchette. This story was particularly interesting to me since it was everywhere, including signs on the buses, social media, the radio and on TV. The sad thing here is that I would probably never hear something like that on the news in my country since cases like Hailey’s are very common.
The kind of news I was used to before coming here were highly negative. Things like the movie-like escape of the world’s most wanted drug lord, corruption-filled government, the kidnapping and killing of businessmen in areas of my country.

Photo: Reuters

Although I can say that I felt safe in the place where I lived in Mexico, and that my quality of life there was good, I do feel that being surrounded by situations like those reflected in the media affected the way I saw things and my emotional state.

What I found really interesting is how I could relate Shahzad’s work to a previous personal experience in one way or another. It really made me think how the news and the environment we are exposed to has a positive or negative impact in our daily lives.

~Gabriel

Sources

Wertsch, J.V. (2002). Voices of Collective Remembering. Cambridge University Press.