As the groups went through their presentations, I was amazed to see the connections to our lives on campus. I learned about the roots of construction and education. I saw connections between our work in tutorial and our other classes. My group used readings from my political science class and another group used information from their linguistics class. All the connections within our small class got me thinking about the connections between texts that we have read. It was incredible to see how all of our keywords were applicable to the texts we’ve analyzed throughout the semester. The presence of education is in many more texts than I would have thought. Even within texts there is the differentiation between formal and informal. When Will and Yaz were explaining the definitons, I saw how applicable all these keywords are to our lives. We will certainly be seeing the actions of agency, consequences of time, and results of education along with many other things in our careers here at Grinnell.
These analysis of keywords and autobiographies will help all of us in our future years at Grinnell. I think it is important to understand the discoveries we have made in our course. I continue to think about the reoccurring themes of patriarchy, revelation, family, travel, and much much more. The information that may have been left out by the writers are also a vital part of the story; I will be reading and analyzing in a much different way after this course.
I really enjoyed creating my keyword presentation and listening to the other groups present. With my keyword, construction, I felt as if I was almost constructing the keyword and the connections myself. As if I was piecing together my experience thus far, and creating a narrative. Of course, Jeremy and I felt as if the typical definitions of construction which refer to building are not completely accurate, in that they disregard unintentional self-construction and self-discovery. My construction of the connections was like this in that when I began, I did not have a layout or a blueprint as a construction company would, and instead from certain connections that came easily I was able to expand further and discover more connections. I feel like this is probably how we all created our presentations, and how our college experience at large is an interplay of related ideas bouncing off one another, interacting to create a mesh of connected ideas and knowledge.