Hello all!
I am excited to be writing my very first blog post! In such an occasion an introduction to myself seems essential, so here it is: My name is Mia Spare, I recently moved to Vancouver, British Columbia from the excessively small town of Round Hill, Virginia. However, I began my life in Annapolis, Maryland, and have since lived in Germany, Austria, India, and Indonesia. Round Hill was somewhat of a culture shock for me, but it is where I fell in love with nature and hiking as I was surrounded by miles and miles of farm land and mountains.
My most recent journey has taken me to UBC where I am taking courses within a Coordinated Arts Program (CAP) focused on Global Citizenship. We’ve spent some time in class discussing what we believe it means to be a global citizen, so for fear of dwelling, I would like to focus my blog post today on a more recent article that we are discussing: an academic research paper by Farhat Shahzad. The paper, “The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning” discusses how the interpretive communities that surround us (family, friends, schools) affect how we remember and learn. According to Shahzad, an “important feature of the landscape of remembering is a community that has a history of remembering together”(304). I took this to mean that communities learn and grow as a group based on their past collective experiences, and bring them closer together. Shahzad also pointed out how interpretive communities such as family and peers create “frames for the interpretation when a human agent mediates with data provided by the textbooks or media representations of an event”(304). I believe this observation allows for a direct connection between the broadness of one’s perspective and the interpretive communities which surround them.
Shahzad gathered the information needed to make these observations by asking a diverse range of university students to write about how they remember and learn about the War on Terror (302). Many of the students recalled instances in which the majority of their learning of the war was mediated by their family. In one passage, an 18 year old female student wrote “My father is the most viable source of information for me. We discuss about many issues whenever we watch TV together”(310). Her passage and many of the others made me realize how much of what I personally know about the War on Terror and many other historical events, was learned through stories my parents and grandparents have told me.
When I was in the sixth grade I was assigned a project in my English class in which we had to find a family member or a family friend who had participated in a war, and prepare a presentation which documented their experience. For this project I chose my Grandfather who fought in the Vietnam war. Over the course of 3 weeks I talked to my grandfather on the phone and recorded story after story of his time in Vietnam, collecting memories and unconsciously forming a very specific view of the war in my head. I didn’t realize that I had gotten only one very biased point of view of the war until my junior year english class when we read a book called “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien. This book described the war in a very different light and highlighted many of the more cruel aspects of war. I went into that class having been already unknowingly influenced by my interpretive community (my grandfather). However, “The Things We Carried” became a technology of memory for me, and mixed with the memories of my grandfathers stories to forever alter my view of the Vietnam War.
There are many other examples of how my learning has been directly affected by my interpretive communities and technologies of memory, and much more to come in my ASTU class, but unfortunately those will have to wait until next time!
Talk to you soon!
Mia Spare 🙂