Read at least 3 students blog short stories about ‘home’ and make a list of the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find. Post this list on your blog with some commentary about what you discovered.

I want to begin by thanking my classmates for sharing their stories of home.  After reading many of them, I’ve quickly realized that many shared very personal experiences–as one would imagine when talking about their home.  However, I am stunned that such authenticity in regards to personal life can be shared and discussed in an academic environment.  It was an honor to read your stories; I am humbled.

Home is an abstract place.

This is the first commonality I noticed in the blogs of my classmates.  Both Ashley and Alanna discuss this in their stories, and their separate journeys on finding physical spaces to call home.  This themed jumped out to me most likely for my own history and struggles to identify a specific physical place as my home (I have a town I call home, just not an exact, physical space).  Alanna’s story of home affected me most strongly with her mention of divorced parents, as her descriptions matched many of my own growing up.  I feel that it is likely that many Canadians struggle to identify a physical, geographical space as home, especially with recent refugees.  I was glad to see this as a common theme throughout our own stories.

You need language to belong.

While this specific assumption of home was not echoed by a majority of classmate blogs, when I read Claudia‘s story of home, I felt it was important to discuss.  Claudia speaks of the difficulties in belonging when language labels are placed on you from an early age.  In Canada, we have two official languages, and many more spoken by many of our other citizens.  Claudia discusses the challenge to find a place to call home when a label of “outsider” or simply “different” is placed on you.  Depending on geographical location, sometimes a restriction to belong in certain areas requires you to have been born there.  This has never occurred to me, as I have never really lived far from the community I was born in, and my community does not get a lot of new inhabitants.  At first, this issue seemed foreign to me, but when I stopped to consider it, the idea makes strange sense.  When I stop to think about it, I realize that there are times when I’ve been on a bus or walking down the street or in a hallway where someone is speaking a language other than English.  It seems strange, off, and immediately indicates the speaker as a potential outsider.  This is all done in my own head mostly unconsciously.  Personally, it does not affect the way I interact with a person, but I can understand how this could lead to discrimination, and for a speaker of a language other than English (or whatever language is common for whatever area) to feel outcast.

While these are only two items for discussion, I feel that they both warrant attention and stand as important concepts.  These two points play off each other and I think will become more relevant as we move further in our studies together.

Thank you all again for sharing your stories.