(I could not figure out how to put it in the correct order)
My process of building ideas and scripts versus actually presenting those ideas was very different due to the time I was given. When I was writing down scenes, traumas, and healing in both of these books in relation to Hillary Chute, I had multiple points and details I wanted to share. However, when it actually came down to presenting those ideas, I had to condense them into rather brief and to the point descriptions since I could not say everything in the 20 second time slot.
However, I did follow the same structure I had laid out in my notes, where I first discusses early on trauma, when safety was lost, then when they started building community, and show their ending position of healing. Through this structure, I was able to show the book’s progression in regard to trauma and healing while also circling back to Hillary Chute’s ideas. To make up for my concise description of these scenes, my slides were made up of mostly just images of pages in the books. This offers my audience context to what specific scene I’m talking about.
Looking at my peers presentations, I would incorporate small titles or summaries on my slides since I only used images. This ultimately forced me to do more talking, which I couldn’t fully fit into the 20 seconds, so by having small portions of text in my slides, it would take off how much I have to speak.
For this assignment, my rhetorical situation was surrounded by the idea of walking into a forest and slowly getting lost. This is conveyed by starting off my playlist with calm and peaceful songs, then songs that feel a little more intense and fearful, and finally a feeling of surrender and acceptance. I chose to set it up this way so my audience will feel like they are on an emotional and physical journey of feeling content, but as you get deeper and more lost in the forest, you become stressed and scared until ultimately you accept your fate. My main rule for this was that each song had to serve a specific purpose in the progression of one’s journey in a forest, along with only using one song per artist. By shaping this specific progression in my playlist, I was able to give listeners a unique way of seeing and feeling a story.
Playlist: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0c6n94Glzamkn76WqE8poN?si=AjX5Z0woRkeTjJwuB4wq7w
Track List:
Welcome Home, Son by Radical Face
Holocene by Bon Iver
We Move Lightly by Dustin O’Halloran
Setting Sun by Lord Huron
Experience by Ludovico Einaudi & Daniel Hope
Eyes on Fire by Blue Foundation
For 12 by Other Lives
Murders by Miracle Musical
Fuel to Fire by Agnes Obel
Where Is My Mind by Maxence Cyrin
For this assignment I chose to do the lion kind scene where Simba is being held up. The biggest challenged I faced in making this is finding a place where i could stand on to seem elevated like in the movie scene.
Through this three part literacy narrative journey, I was exposed to new forms of expression when I created my own comic, which deepened my understanding of how impactful visual details are in telling a story or emotion. Going back to my first literacy narrative, I reflected on how perspective plays a big role in how a narrative is understood and felt. When making my comic, I realized that I expressed my academic journey much more authentically through small but intentional details. So when I went back to look at my first literacy narrative, I saw the divide between me explaining my reading and writing journey and expressing my genuine emotions and takeaways in that moment. Therefore, when I was writing this final literacy narrative, I maintained the goal of telling my reading and writing journey with the depth of my feelings and perspective at that time.
From birth till I was around 4 years old, my environment consisted of pure Spanish. At every corner you would hear it, whether it be conversations between my parents, neighbors, or family members, or even just the TV channels we would always tune into daily, everything was spoken and communicated in our native language. My sense and overall understanding of the world was shaped by the assumption that everyone else also only spoke Spanish. So it came as a great surprise to me when one day my older cousin came over to my house and began speaking this foreign, almost alien like, language she called English, shattering the bubble I hadn’t realized was around me all this time.
This exposure to the outside world opened a door to the world outside my house and predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, creating a sense of curiosity and eagerness to learn everything about this foreign land, starting with the language they spoke. Starting kindergarten a couple months later, I was finally able to enter the world of English speakers and learn how to speak just like them and my older cousin. This eagerness however, slowly disappeared as I went about my first day of school. Sitting at my desk, I remember looking around at my peers for the next year and noticing how rather odd they appeared. Unlike those in my neighborhood, they had rather lighter skin tones than me and were all communicating in English, with there being little to no words I could decipher. This continued throughout the day where I couldn’t understand anything my teachers said, let alone understand the content they were showing. While I sat in my seat not having said a word all day, all my other peers were already making friends and raising their hands to answer questions. I felt like an outsider who didn’t get the memo on having to know English prior to coming to this place.
After a few weeks of this, my parents and I knew something had to change, so instead of staying in that loop of confusion and stress, I decided to learn this English language by any means. My journey started by being placed in ESL classes, enrolling in afterschool tutoring, and working one on one with my parents at home. It was a back and forth battle of learning one thing and having to swiftly move onto the next thing, making English feel like this never ending blackhole of information. While at times it felt grueling and unrewarding, my eagerness to keep learning grew more and more as I slowly started seeing progress. I moved from only understanding small words to phrases to then being able to read and write full sentences. While these accomplishments weren’t met with much enthusiasm by my other peers and teachers, I felt a deep sense of pride knowing that despite starting off school on a bad footing, I was able to swiftly catch up to the current level of my peers. Using these newly formed skills and confidence in myself, I dove into my classes ready to put them to the test.
The rest of my time in elementary school and into middle and high school was spent growing my use of English in regard to reading and writing. With the mindset that I could learn anything if I truly put in the time and effort, I felt myself growing more and more. No longer was I facing challenges that carried the same level of stress and confusion as learning English, allowing my reading and writing skills to develop much more naturally compared to the beginning. I grew from being able to write small paragraphs and read simple chapter books to completing longer and more complex essays and finishing long novels without the same frustration I once had. While at times I did experience occasional challenges, the vast amount of help I got in the earliest years of my academic journey allowed me to expand my abilities rather smoothly.
The pattern of natural growth was disrupted when I entered my freshman seminar class. Before this class, my reading and writing skills focused on reading straightforward texts and writing traditional five paragraph essays, which hadn’t failed me until now. This class however, tested me in analyzing much more complex texts and emphasized on ones word precision in a way I hadn’t seen before, and I very quickly was faced with the reality that my current skills would not suffice. While I still struggle, attending office hours and seeking additional help has helped my ability to analyze and write grow in a new direction I hadn’t experienced before. Reflecting on this class, I have now seen the true power each word carries in developing its message, and even though it’s been challenging, it has strengthened my skills and understanding beyond what high school taught.
In these charts I tracked my daily social interactions in regard to their duration, quality, and effect on my energy levels. I categorized my social interactions into the categories of either roommate, friends, classmates and professors, family members, or strangers. I used these 5 categories in the following 3 charts so my data would not get too complex to chart.
In my first chart I made a stacked row chart to show how much time I spent socializing with a specific group each day. The chart closely reflected my different schedules since on days I have multiple classes, like Tuesday and Thursday, I have more social interactions than on lighter days where I have little to no tasks to do. A judgment call I had to make in this chart was whether or not to include the time spent with myself into the chart, but I decided to add myself since a big chunk of time would be unaccounted for. In my second chart I looked at my social interactions in regard to how I would rate the overall quality of them. I chose to show this data in the form of a bar chart because it allows for me to compare different categories of data next to each other, letting any trends be easily spotted. Looking at the chart, I notice a trend where the quality of interactions with familiar individuals like family, roommates, and friends heavily outweighed the quality of interactions with people I didn’t know as well, like classmates and strangers. This made me realize my tendency of being rather closed off with people I don’t know as well since those interactions were rated lower in quality. In the third chart I looked at the same interactions I had that week, but instead I focused on their aftermath. I ranked each interaction on a scale from 1 to 10 based on how much they affected my energy levels. A key trend I found in this chart was that on Tuesday and Thursday the lowest rankings were recorded. Seeing as these days I have multiple back to back classes, I can correlate how the more tasks I have to do, the more impactful social interactions are on my energy levels. Another detail that adds to this interpretation is that on lighter days, like Monday and Wednesday, my energy levels after social interactions were higher since I had fewer tasks on my plate. However, to improve my findings, I could’ve added the time of day into my data. By adding this detail in, I could compare how my change in energy levels after social interactions correlated to the time of day.
The process it took to create this literacy narrative involved choosing what time frame I zoomed in on and how I would go about drawing that. Looking at the different phases of life I spoke about in my literacy narrative regarding reading and writing, I chose to focus on my early years. I specifically chose to focus on these years because they were a main influence on how I read and write today, given that that’s when I learned English and how to read and write in it. Drawing this stage of my life however was very different than describing it. When making this comic I had to make sure that my story and overall message were delivered not only through words but also through specific visual and artistic choices. First I decided how my story plot would be drawn out and which parts offered the most insight. Once I knew what I wanted to draw, I split up my comic into three sections, where the first page focused on my introduction to school, the second on my struggle with reading and writing in English, and the third on my dedication to learning English and benefiting from learning it both inside and outside the classroom. By splitting these three points into different sections I was able to hone in on each event that led up to how I read and write now. In my first section, one visual choice I made was having the school be full of only white colored figures while I was brown colored. I made this visual choice because it allowed viewers to have a deeper understanding of my sense of alienation in an only English speaking environment. In the second section, I purposefully decided to take up two panels that were zoomed in on my worksheet because it allowed viewers to visibly see how I felt learning English. I put the words on the paper in a false language so viewers could experience a similar sense of confusion and despair as I had felt in this time of my life. Finally, on my last page, I decided on doing multiple time jumps, so viewers could see my process of learning English and being able to apply it inside and outside the classroom. The last two panels specifically show time jumps of me using my new skills to read multiple books highlighting my enjoyment of reading outside the classroom. In the other panel it showed me coming out of school with an A+ report card in hand, symbolizing that my new abilities in reading and writing are being used to their fullest potential inside the classroom as well. Looking back at my comic altogether and how I conveyed my feelings through visual choices, a choice I would have made if I had more time or resources would be making the other students and teachers into aliens. While it sounds odd, it would’ve created a deeper connection to the cultural differences I faced and its connection to my reading and writing skills. Stereotypically, in the United States, Hispanics are often considered aliens or abnormal, but when I first entered school I was the one who felt others around me were abnormal since they spoke a language I couldn’t understand. So by having the secondary characters be aliens, I could’ve better illustrated my sense of alienation and confusion. As the comic progressed I hoped to have the alien characters transform into human beings and shift their confusing language to English. The gradual change would showcase my growth in reading and writing in English and my feelings of confusion turning to thriving by building a sense of joy in reading outside of class and exceeding inside the classroom. Literacy Comic:Link
I began this process by looking at examples of other Quadriptych work that was provided in the assignment. After getting a good understanding of how other Quadriptych’s have been done, I started looking for ideas and finally settled on doing one about the bus. I decided to do this story based around a bus ride because while I was reading the assignment, I was also on the public bus, and this exact scene played out in front of me. After getting my storyline down, I only struggled with how I would go about drawing this. Given that I am not the best artist, I decided to draw this comic the same way I did with the triptych assignment, where the background is real-world photographs. Having more to work with, I felt I could tell a deeper story unlike the triptych comic where I only had 3 panels to work with. This story expressed the same way I felt while I was on the bus and a disruptive individual broke the silence in the bus.
