4.04.2009
Update on the Candyman!
12.16.2008
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
Collaborative Interpretation of "Father's Milk"
Below, you'll find an image created by Calley in response to "Father's Milk," with text from the chapter selected by Abbey that we think interprets her art.
It occurred to him one slow dusk as he looked down at her, upon his breast, that she was teaching him something. This notion seemed absurd when he first considered it, and then, as insights do when we have the solitude to absorb them, he eventually grew used to the idea and paid attention to the lesson. The word faith hooked him. She had it in such pure supply. She nursed with utter simplicity and trust, as though the act itself would produce her wish. (7)
Here we've got a picture by Fly with text selected by Nikhil.
Sometimes across the room, at night, in his sleep, her father gasps as though stabbed, dies into himself. She is jolted awake, frightened, and thinks to check his breath with her hand, but then his ragged snore lulls her. In the fresh daylight, staring up at the patches of mildew on the ceiling, Matilda watches him proudly from the corners of her eyes as he cracks the ice in the washing pail, feeds a spurt of hidden stove flame, talks to himself. She loves him like nothing else. He is her father, her human. Still, sometimes, afflicted by an anxious sorrow, she holds her breath to see what will happen, if he will save her. Heat flows up the sides of her face and she opens her lips but before her mouth can form a word she sees yellow, passes out, and is flooded by blueness, sheer blueness, intimate and strange, the color of her necklace of beads. (11)
Reflections...
12.11.2008
Neighbor Spotlight: Jim Hawley
yesser
SEEING NEW FACES AND MANY NEW INTERESTING
PLACES;LEARNING TOGETHER HAND IN HAND,
PAVING THE WAY BRIDGING THE GAP,
ALL FROM DIFFERENT PLACES, BRINGING
TO THE TABLE ALL.
IF JOINED TOGETHER WE CREATE A BRIDGE
IT CAN NEVER FALL…
-WE ARE LIVING AND LEARNING-