My Experience
My experience in this class has been generally positive. I have enjoyed this class very much and its overall title and subject matter align very much with my interests. I enjoyed that I was able to choose what I wanted to read. Also, using experiences, features, and narrative technologies was something completely new to me that I very much enjoyed. I think that from now on when I read a new text I will forever keep experiences and technologies in mind. It gave me a way to relate and express the way I was feeling about a text, and I wish I had been introduced to these strategies/techniques sooner. With that it made me more eager to read and listen to my other classmates’ creative works, and even gave me the confidence to give feedback and participate in class discussions. Once I got past making the first post of the semester I felt pretty comfortable and sure of what I was doing. There was never pressure for my post to be up to par with other classmates’ and everything was always open for class discussion/feedback. If anything the classroom setting, the way we sat and discussed each class, often prompted even more experiences and technologies for my own work. I felt very comfortable sharing and reading other’s posts.
WonderCat was also a very big help, because sometimes I couldn’t put into words what I was feeling. It helped to always have access to a tool, and not be limited to just one choice. As I read different books, I started realizing there was a great number of experiences and technologies that I could write about. Having WonderCat also just prompted creativity because sometimes what you were getting at wasn’t exactly defined.
In terms of immigration, I initially chose this class because of its title and my experience as an immigrant. I had no idea that it would prompt this much creativity out of me. I was also surprised at how relatable some of our class discussions were. It was an amazing experience to learn about the stories of other’s in this class. There was one particular day when various people including myself got into a discussion of our own migration stories, after someone brought up English. English is spoken around the world to accommodate English speakers, but many English speakers do not accommodate other languages. A few different people then started to discuss their own experiences with English and their transition to America. I even shared that after migrating here from the Caribbean, I taught myself to speak slowly and annunciate English slang much more. I also shared that I was forced to switch Elementary schools at a young age, because of my word pronunciation.
I have learned that immigration is not just literally moving from one country to another. Immigration can be any journey that has been endured, experienced, or viewed by people. This has been made clearly to me not just by class discussion, but also by the diverse literature I’ve learned about throughout the semester. For example, my last read James by Percival Everett, was not a typical immigration story. However, it still displayed a journey, a shift, and a development that related to greater themes of this class.
