Humanities Final Portfolio

“Creativity seems to emerge from multiple experiences, coupled with a well-supported development of personal resources, including a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known. In all creative processes we are pushing the boundaries of what we know now, to explore new possibilities; we are drawing on the skills we have now, often stretching and evolving them as the work demands.”

At SLA we focus on what it means to push boundaries and think outside of the box. We do not only look at the definitions and the history of what happened but we are given the ability to analyze and look at cause and effect through discussions and projects and journals and other learning tools that aren’t used in the typical classroom. The thing that I took out of this year during our english and history classes is that as things develop through the world we have to make sure that our actions don’t make things worse and that we do not try to better ourselves while worsening the life of others and how this leads to many inequalities. Through the many hardships that we learned about this year the common theme for me was who made this happen and how did this happen.

Through our discussion about language I have found that language is power and that without that the person who is mostly in control when it comes to language is the one with a better understanding of language. Through our classes about language one thing that really stuck with me was that, “baldwin says that without black english there would be no standard english. That the white’s developed their dialect from the blacks, while the blacks are still frowned upon as uneducated and inarticulate. White’s didn’t want to educate blacks unless it was to their benefit in doing so.” When we had to write our language autobiography I wrote a lot about what it meant for me to be able to speak a second language and how through this unit it has made me realize that in life that will be a very powerful thing that I can utilize.

An amazing thing about this year was looking at race, and racism in a whole new light. While we were working on a journal something that stood out to me was that “race is a modern idea, race helped be a divider in the act of freedom.” This summarized a lot of what I learned through grade school. Through this quote I realized that this is why race is such an important things for different cultures because in our society race is power. Race gave me the idea of my oped topic which talked about racial profiling in America.