Hi There! Welcome and thanks for visiting my blog. This is a place where I will get to voice my ideas and share my interdisciplinary perspective on the topic of Global Citizenship.
The topic of Globalization has always been of great interest to me and I look forward to analyzing it through the perspectives of Sociology, Political Science, English Literature, and through Geography!
During the past two weeks we have been studying academic writing while analyzing “The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning” by Farhat Shahzad (University of Ottawa). Her contribution to the process of mediation/learning was that there is an additional factor that affects how we remember things; Interpretive Communities.
What particularity interested me was how an ‘authoritative discourse’ can exist amongst one’s interpretive community, especially in the role of teachers. This really made me think about how much we students tend to place such value to the opinions of teacher – especially in elementary/high school.
I still vividly remember having a discussion in my previous ‘interpretive community’, my grade seven class. We were having a discussion about the war in Iraq and USA’s intervention. One of my peer’s asked my teacher, Mr. Driedger, what his stance was on the war. Mr. Dreidger responded by saying “The US has no business to be in another’s country, how would we feel if someone just came to our own home land?”. As an oblivious student who was unaware of the real facts of the war, I went through many years thinking that the war was meaningless and that the US were in fact invaders who had no business in their invasions. Why? All because I had invested such value in what an educator said. Thinking back to this event really made me question any other previous interpretations I could have made simply because I heard it from a person of authority, like a teacher.
Recently, Dr. Lugar said something that really caught my attention in the subject of ‘authoritative discourse’. She discussed how in high school we have to interpret essays from various ‘technologies of memory’ and how we can only take a stance if we can prove it with the various evidences we can obtain. However as she stated, we as scholars in academia have entered a new community where we can take any stance and prove it how we like whether it may be research, adding on to theoretical frameworks, or many other possibilities.
I feel like universities are amazing settings for ‘interpretive communities’ especially in discussions. In grade 12 year I took an International Relations course at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. I felt like during the lectures I wasn’t able to grasp much information, (partly due to the fact that my professor read from the textbook!) ; however, I felt that during our classroom discussions I was able to really learn. After all, as Shahzad points out ‘[c]ollective remembering requires group context’ and that the ‘level of emotional attachment’ is important.
I remember being engaged in our group discussions because we had a peer who had been a refuge herself from Syria. She had some really personal and emotionally attached perspectives surrounding the various issues we discussed and I feel like it was an influential force that helped me shape my opinion and memories on various topics.
My past experiences really excite me to be joining an institution like UBC that is so vast and diverse with different students. I’m looking forward to discussing various topics around global citizenship and globalization and hearing the views of different students and academia in my new ‘interpretive community’
Until next time…
-Kaveel Singh
