Reflection

To whomever may be reading,

The Living Learning Community of Cultures and Communities has been a wonderful experience.  As a resident of the UWM RiverView Residence Hall, you get the chance to be involved in a Living Learning Community (LLC, as we call it) of your choice.  It just so happens that we are focused on cultures and communities.  As part of an LLC, you are enrolled in a related class; our class is English 150: Multicultural America.  It fulfills your GER plus adds an element of Service Learning too.  Although I may be biased, our LLC is the best!

Besides being able to wake up and take the elevator straight to our classroom, seeing how it is held in the RiverView Residence Hall, I have enjoyed the connections made with the local Riverwest neighborhood.  Not only has it been part of our course to involve ourselves in the community by attending neighborhood as well as campus events, but it has been very much part of our course to serve the community in some way, shape, or form.  We chose to write two articles for the Riverwest Currents—published and issued here in the Riverwest neighborhood—distributed throughout the greater Milwaukee.  It has been our honor to meet and work with influential people actively bettering the community in which they live.  

As students who live and learn together, we have learned to appreciate community, how it is developed and maintained.  Being able to work with someone is one thing, but living with them is entirely another.  Through our experience in the Riverwest community, we have a better understanding of how neighbors should be and how community thrives.  I have enjoyed applying the texts we've read to the realities of life and personal interactions.  Mary Louise Pratt defines a term in which she refers to as a “contact zone” in her “What is a Contact Zone” as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power,” and I, with the addition of most if not all my classmates, have identified a contact zone as the makings of a community, and it is how each contact zone is acknowledged and treated that a community can function.  

RiverView's Culture and Communities LLC has given me insight to what community is made of and the importance of it.  I have loved being able to walk down the hall to ask a classmate a question on homework and have enjoyed having a class in my living space.  It is a great chance to escape the normal classroom experience and get a taste for life itself.  

                                                                     Take Care,

                                                                                  Amy