Walled Women

As some of you know, I was traveling in Northern Europe for a couple of weeks in late January and early February. I came upon a couple of walled communities which (of course!) made me think of you all. In Bruges, Belgium, I spent a peaceful morning in a begijnhof (or beguinage), dating from the 13th century, which once housed a Catholic order of single and widowed women, and today is home to Benedictine nuns: 

And then, Normandy, I visited the astonishing abbey on Mont St Michel, an island fortress with a cloister strangely reminiscent of--yet different from--Bryn Mawr's:

What do you wish you/we could have talked about with the women at the jail?

I wish we could have talked about the tension of Bryn Mawr students being able to leave at the end of the day, or the broad topic of power dynamics between us.

I wish I could’ve known why the women wanted copies of Zehr’s book on the children of incarcerated people.  How could they actively choose to step face to face with such a poignant reminder of their failures and losses?

I wish we could have asked – and they could have told me – about the details of their lives.

Also, I wish we could have reflected together on what we learned by making art: What we learned about being creative/having agency within institutional structures; about finding our niches; about working collaboratively.

What did the virtual tour of BMC really make you feel?  I noticed you became very quiet and reserved. – to (a particular woman)

What did you expect from this class prior to starting it? – whole class

I wish I was able to ask about religion and its role in the women’s lives while incarcerated.  I also wish I was brave enough to share experiences I had in common and to admit some of my own faults to make the conversation more equal.  And why didn’t I just ask how they felt about us coming in and how they saw our class, outside of an escape from the monotony of the jail’s daily routine.

            My group’s final project was a workshop that touched on different types of oppression and ways in which different groups are silenced on campus. We explore voice and Jody’s by educating people on the different ways in which privilege appears on campus. We used the discussion-based way of teaching/learning in our workshop. We explore the notion of vision and Barbs class by making the participants think about their niches on campus and where it is that they feel comfortable and where they do not. We used silence in our workshop by having silent discussions and giving people time to reflect on what they have seen on the posters before commenting. We also had a Delpit way of “teaching”. Throughout most of the workshop (i.e. cross the line activity) our point would get across depending on how the participants interpreted the activity. Throughout that activity, we included questions that touched on religion, gender and sexuality and race with the hopes that the participants would make the connections themselves.

Initially when I was discussing writing my reflection with Anne, she suggested that I write one for both the 360 and Ecological Imaginings because so many of my connections in both classes were deeply intertwined with one another. I ultimately decided against this because I wanted to give both classes distance from one another because there are many ways in which I also see the points at which they do not intersect. However, it was not until I was looking over my posts on Serendip to do my reflections that I could really visually see the ways in which the 360 course cluster and my Ecolit class overlapped. Many of my connections to Ecological Imaginings were finding the ways in which the Environment movement is racially and class exclusive, something I had never realized or encountered before. My concept of the way nature affects people significantly influenced how I perceived the Prison environment. One of the other connections I began to make toward the end of the course was between Jody’s education course and Ecolit revolved around divergent thinking and “play.” I began to wonder if the ways in which we are taught to focus in school, and filter out divergent thoughts was not ecologically friendly because we are taught to filter out of the “distracting” environment as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvwFc-6kWys

When Danielle and I first started envisioning our final project, we were both very drawn to the idea of looking at privilege. Danielle had been thinking about doing a zine on the topic of privilege, but when we discovered our mutual interest in video-making, we thought that might be another way of sharing the thoughts that have come out of our class in an accessible and fun way. We really wanted to look at how Bryn Mawr impacts and is impacted by differences in privilege and one of the places we started our search was the classroom.

In order to avoid stigmatizing a specific professor or set of students, Danielle wrote a script that we used as the basis for our fictional classroom scene. One of the things I’ve really noticed as a result of practicing silence and thinking about how much space my words take up in the classroom – as well as comparing our Bryn Mawr speaking experience with being in the Cannery – was how people’s notice of vocal space (or lack of notice) really impacts the classroom environment.

As I reflect on my experiences in this 360, I can’t help but feel like I can never articulate my feelings on the ways I’ve been learning. It was incredible being a part of this group and it was also too intense at times. But I think this 360 has been the most challenging learning experience I’ve had yet. What got me thinking about how to answer this question was when Danielle interviewed me for her video project. I found myself stumbling over what I wanted to say. As much as I’d love to share what I’ve learned in this 360 so far with other people, I don’t think I can because the experience was so personal. I can’t exactly describe the experience to other people if they weren’t in it because I wouldn’t be doing our 360 any justice. But I hope we made a good attempt at explaining our experiences through our final presentation of our 360.

I’ve come such a long way as a student and as a participant in this 360 but I still have such a long way to go. I’m finding that I have been contradicting myself a lot and that’s troublesome, but it’s the troublesome learning that comforts me because that’s what learning looks like. It makes me think of the Threshold Concepts we talk so much about in my TLI partnership. Whether it was me shakily standing up to walk over and join the fishbowl discussion to say what I was thinking without thinking it out fully or me choosing to write so personally about my experiences at home, I took risks.

http://youtu.be/c2Ykntn0k4E

Oh I’m done with school, I’m out of motivation

I’m walking through a fog of stifled dreams

There will always be something missing here

Falsely composed

Trying to ignore finals week hysteria, 99 problems, and more

Oh I’m ready to go forward

Ready or not here I come

Dreams are arising from the unconscious C

I'm I'm excited for what's to come

I'm facing reality finding new purpose in life

I want to live my life on my terms

I want to live full-heartedly

Falsely composed

Trying to ignore finals week hysteria, D99 problems, and more

Welcome everybody! We're happy that you’ve joined us here to see what we've learned in our 360° this semester. A 360° is a cluster of interdisciplinary courses that look at one main theme. Ours is called Women in Walled Communities.
 
In The Rhetorics of Silence, we examined the many functions and meanings of silence: as a political tool, an imaginative space, and a powerful form of communicative expression--as well as the result of lack of agency and or the denial of voice.

In Learning in Institutional Spaces, we explored how the institutions of schools and prisons promote or inhibit learning. It was in this course that we looked most critically at this institution, Bryn Mawr College, and its own history of power and oppression, which sparked a lot of interest in Perry House as an embodiment of some of that history.