Ethnography Project Updates!

My group's ethnography project on Architecture is coming along well.  We have decided to focus our attention on three main topics which are, architecture within academic buildings, general buildings, and within the classroom.  I think this is a good start for us because we all have different focus points to dig into while bringing our project back to the central topic.  I think our idea of creating sort of a compilation video to provide answers to our different questions will be a great.  The only problem that we may run into is finding out how to use the movie maker website that Lacy sent to us.  Somehow though, we will make it work, hopefully!  Wish us luck!

Annotated Bibliography

• Pizzato, Mark. Personal interview. 1 Nov. 2012.

I plan on conducting this interview some time soon.  This interview is important because it will help me understand more significance behind Robinson Hall.  I will also conduct this interview to stress the importance of architecture, and how architecture can affect a classes style of learning.  In this interview I will ask question of how teaching in this particular classroom in Robinson Hall may be different from teaching in any other classes.

• Manship, Lacy. "#freehand1101." Map. Ed. Kedric M. Wright. N.p.: n.p., n.d. N. pag. Print.

This map created by Professor Lacy was very useful in choosing which building would be better to analyze specific architectural differences, downfalls, and improvements.  When using this map I noticed that all of the buildings on this campus have their own unique shape, which made it much easier to choose which building to look closer at.  In choosing Robinson Hall I noticed that it's shape is not as unique compared to other theatre buildings.  This map was very helpful in helping me recognize this.

• Diao, Dr. Yuanan. "Professor Interview." Telephone interview.

This interview will be used as a contrast interview to my other interview.  This specific professor teaches math in a lecture style classroom, and I would like to find out if this is easier or hard to do.  In this interview I will ask specific questions about the architecture of the classroom, and if he believes it helps or hurts to effectiveness of his teaching.  The usefulness of this interview is to use as a control group to my previous interview of Professor Pizzato.

Remapping the Map!

After sitting down with my Architecture group we came up with some pretty neat things that relate both literacy and architecture.  While sitting down in Atkins library we created a list of things that ties architecture into literacy.  On our list we wrote:

• The specific ways in which the buildings are set up.
• The way the buildings are situated on campus.
• The actual insides of th buildings.
• Specifics within the buildings, like artwork or etc.

This list helped us realize how architecture can positively or negatively affect literacy in many different ways.  In the updated overlay version of my map I added different classroom layouts.  The different classroom layouts can affect literacy greatly.  A lecture style classroom versus a intimate smaller size classroom changes a person literacy history dramatically.

Robinson Hall and It's Coolness!

I chose Robinson Hall as my location to map simply because of all the amazing points the building contains, physically but mostly figuratively!  Robinson Hall truly is a mecca of creativity and literacy underlife.  People always associate literacy with just strictly reading and writing but I believe Robinson Hall completely shatters those standards.  By housing the dance, theater, art, and music departments, I believe Robinson Hall truly is the most important building on campus that deals with different forms of literacy underlife.  When walking into the building for the first time one would not get the impression of it being a building of the arts.  It actually seems like some boring science building.  But after wandering around on the different floors, I slowly began to pick up the artistic vibe.  I began to notice special paintings, and sculptures throughout the building.  Surprisingly a majority of these photos went unnamed.  This automatically made me picture literary underlife.  By not naming the piece of art, I was unable to identify where it came from, and who designed and made it!  That seems pretty shady to me, which honestly brought me all the way back to the word "underlife."  I believe Robinson Hall and all of it's obvious artistic vibes, but also it's non-obvious artistic vibes is what makes it an important place to discover literary underlife.

Discovering the Discovered

The place I chose to map on my journey was Robinson Hall.  I chose this location partially because I have a class there and it seemed logical, and partially because there really is a lot going on in the building.  Robinson Hall is home to our universities' theater.  This is really unique because I think about myself having a class amongst greatness, and where it is created.  Robinson Hall is also home to multiple music, dance, art, and theater classes.  In this location I noticed that it was a very plain building (to be a building of the arts).  Generally art buildings are exciting, and full of color, but this building is the complete opposite.  White walls, white floors, white lights, white everything!  But surprisingly I notice that this building has a lot of "underlife."  This building has a lot of amazing things running through it's veins, just like the theater class I take in it.  This led me to understand that just because the building is pretty bland the things it creates within are things that go unmatched.  The map I drew just describes the multiple "walks of life" that are within this building, Robinson Hall!

Two Ways of Writing

I want to talk more about the in-class assignment we did on putting our literacy narrative plot on paper.  I think it was interesting how we first had to put our original plot into picture formation down on paper, and this is what I drew.

 

 

If you notice in my drawing I start with just basic background info, then transition into my thoughts on the situation.  Then I go into a important flashback, then an explanation of the flashback which leads into a reslolution.  I thought this was an extremely boring and generic way to tell my story.  I thought of this as like a boring children's book way of explaining and telling my story.  So when we were asked to write an alternate version I came up with this......

 

 

 

In my second version  I placed my flashback as the opening of my literacy narrative.  I think it was pretty different and cool to do it like this because it has a completely different flow now.  I then go into specific examples, then a little writing experience and history.  Then I tell my actual story which is then followed by another flashback which finishes off with what happened in the end.  I think this way of writing is a lot more interesting.  It's not the basic and predictable writing that I had before which makes it more appealing.

 

 

Atkins Library, 10am, okay!

 

This entire journey was extremely interesting and different!  It was kind of fun to meet with my writing group outside of class and actually do something that involved us working together.  I really enjoyed looking for our text to write beside.  It was kind of hard to find something that was relevant to all of our literacy narratives all at the same time.  After about 20 minutes of searching and asking the other writing groups about how they selected their mentor text we found something pretty relatable.  We discovered the newspaper section in the Atkins library, and it was awesome!  We finally found an article about a bicycle culture that was pretty interesting!  This article was called "Two-wheel town: Belmont build bicycle culture" written by Joe DePriest.  After sitting briefly and writing to the text our writing group shortly discussed what we all wrote.  This was great because it allowed us to see how similar and different all of our texts and interpretations were!