Hidden Literacy: The Emerging Man

For the Ethnography Project my group chose to investigate the hidden literacy behind some of the sculptures that can be found around campus. The sculpture I chose to investigate was "The Emerging Man" which is located between Cato, Fretwell, and Denny.

What I wanted to do was interview people about this piece so I chose to interview both a boy and a girl to see if their responses would be similar or different.

Here is my interview with a guy named Nathan.

Cory: What statement do you think the sculpture makes?

Nathan: Work hard.

Cory: What do you think the theme behind this piece is?

Nathan: Power and Knowledge
Cory: How does this piece make you feel?

Nathan: It makes me feel like as long as I work hard I will be able to achieve something.

Cory: What message do you think the artist was trying to get across with this piece?

Nathan: To persevere through struggle.

After my interview with Nathan I interviewed a girl named Elise.

Cory: What statement do you think the sculpture makes?

Elise: Strength and Power

Cory: What do you think the theme behind this piece is?

Elise: Hercules

Cory: What do you think the theme behind this piece is?

Elise: Empowered, like I could go lift weights.

Cory: What message do you think the artist was trying to get across with this piece?

Elise: Great things come from little things.

I actually really enjoyed doing these interviews because it allowed me to see what other people think about the sculpture. I think with a piece as powerful as this one I think that the responses will be the same between both men and women. I think that it really speaks to the literacy of a piece that the themes of power and strength are so prevalent that you get similar answers when asking questions from various people. I perosnally think the theme of the piece is the struggle to find freedom, but I can see how others can see the theme as strength and power.

Mapping UNCC

The assingment was to go to various places around campus and document any instance of Literacy Underlife that we saw. Whether it be a conversation someone is having, artwork, or even various movements a person makes.
I chose to go to three different locations: The library, Belk Tower, and lastly I just walked around Oak (where I live) to look for various instances of Underlife.

This is what I wrote down in my daybook....

If you look closely you can see that I noticed the most instances of Underlife while I was sitting at Belk tower, however while I was walking around Oak looking for instances of Underlife I stumbled upon some graffiti painted on the wall around one of the walk ways.

This is the picture of the graffiti. Even though I found so many instances of Underlife at the Belk Tower I chose to mark the place I found the graffiti on the map because I think art is one of the easiest ways to express yourself and art is almost always beautiful. Plus I really like the message of this art because I think it serves as a friendly reminder that we arent the only people on this planet so we need to remember to share this planet we live on.

 

 Sorry about how unorganized this post is, once I inserted the pictures organization just went out the window.

Revision...

These past few weeks in class we have been writing our Literacy Narratives and since we turned in our first draft we have been doing different editing workshops in order to help us revise our papers and make them better and more interesting. On October 4th, Lacy had us do a drawing of the breakdown of our paper in order to figure out what our paper was lacking and what we could do in order to make it better.

This is my first drawing....

 

Then after we drew the first drawing Lacy told us to do another drawing and break down the original drawing even further.

Drawing number 2

 

I had never revised a paper like this before so I was interested to see what this form of revision would do in order to help make my paper better and I was amazed to realize how much information was actually in my paper. This form of revision also helped me to realize what my paper was lacking, whether it be descriptions of things, or even if I was spending too much time on a topic in the paper.
Having to do these drawings made the revision process of this paper much more fun and interacive, rather than having someone just go over your paper with a red pen and make marks where they thought you needed to change things. I can honestly say that I would enjoy doing revision activities like this in the future.

Mid-Term Assignment

For the Mid-Term assingment our writing group was sent on a "mission" to the Atkins Library to find a mentor text which would help us to write our Literacy Narrative. So.... My group decided to meet at 9:30 on Tuesday morning (because we knew we would all be free) on the second floor of the library. When we first met we took a couple minutes to discuss the objective of the day and what we needed to accomplish. We decided that it would be best to find some sort of short story to use as our mentor text so that we did not have to read through a novel trying to "write beside the text". Then we kind of wandered aimlessly to the third floor just browsing the shelves looking for anything that could be used as a mentor text but all we could find were books on Philosophy. Next we figured the best thing to do to find a mentor text would be to go to the computer and search for key words that would narrow our search. Once we got to the computer we typed the words "mentor text" and "writing" into the search bar. There was a book that seemed like something we could use so I wrote down the Call Number. Then our group moved to the 6th floor looking for the book. After searching for the book for about 10 minutes I realized that I wrote down the call number wrong and no one could remember the name of the book so we gave up on trying to find that specific book. After the whole not being able to find the book debackle happened my group wandered around on the 6th floor for a little while looking for other books that we could possibly use.

After this wandering went on for some time, Johnny went to the computer and googled mentor texts and found the title of a book he thought we could use. The title of the book was "Owl Moon" and so we searched the Library Catalog for it and found out that the book was on the 5th floor. This time I wrote down the Call Number in its entirety so that we could find the book when we got to the 5th floor. So as a group we wandered to the 5th floor in search of "Owl Moon". Once we got to the 5th floor it was relatievely easy to find the book because I had written down the call number correctly. Then once we found the book we created a circle of chairs in the back corner of the 5th floor so that we could discuss how this would be a good mentor text and also so that we could "write beside the text" and discuss our writing as a group.

                                                                                                   

This is what I wrote alongside the text!