Katie's Portfolio

Blog #21 As you reflect on the class’s trajectory of readings in the context of this podcast, what role do you see language playing in your life? Work hard to articulate your relationship with language–the good, the bad, and the ugly. How important has language been to you in the past? How important is it now? What role do you see language playing in your future? 

Language is one of the most critical tools we as humans have. Without language, we wouldn’t be able to communicate or collaborate. Language is what allows us to be social creatures. Language isn’t always auditory, it can be gestures and facial expressions. Listening to this podcast, I couldn’t help be feel awful for the man who essentially had no language until he reached 27 years old. He lived an isolated life, not knowing how to communicate or really that it was even possible. I can’t imagine feeling that alone and never being able to express myself with language of any kind.

Language has been so important in my life. Language is how I express my emotions and my thoughts to those that I care about. Language is how I reach out to people, find opportunities, and get educated. Language is what my relationships are founded on. Had I not been able to communicate, I wouldn’t have the friends that I do now. I also would not have the same quality relationships that I have with my family had I not been able to communicate with them. Language is also important in rugby. Language was how I was able to learn the rules of the game, and how I communicate with my team throughout a game.

Language also can hurt us. The English language has many words meant specifically to hurt. Language can let us down, make us angry, and make us sad. While these emotions may not be fun in the moment, it is important that we are able to feel them. Language is what stimulates and promotes us to feel emotions. Without it, our emotional states would not be the same.

Language will always be important in my life. It will be important as I enter my career, build more relationships, and when I have kids. I will have the task of teaching language to my children. A life without language would not operate smoothly. Taking away one’s language is taking away a basic need.

Revise a paragraph based on Klinkinborg’s advice. Post the before and after. Reflect on what you notice about the changes.

Before:

Fashion has always been reflective of our societal state, evolving and changing in conjunction.  Fashion is currently, now more than ever, extremely political. From political graphic t-shirts to modern cultural clothing, fashion is about more than just clothes looking good; it’s what they mean and what it says to wear them.   Perhaps one of the biggest waves in the current sea of fashion is the crossing of gender norms.  Women have begun to find a greater place in street style, femininity is becoming prominent in men’s fashion and androgenity is widely considered to have sex appeal and show confidence.  Fashion is at the forefront of expressing gender on a spectrum. Today, gender is considered the societal perception of how a person expresses themselves, while sex deals with biological characteristics.  While gender is starting to be comprehended as a spectrum of expression, sex has historically been interpreted as binary using incorrect analyses of scientific observations of nature.  Even with the progress made for the rights of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals, sex remains a misunderstood concept. Perhaps art is the key to solving myths about sex, just as it is used to understand and express the spectrum of gender.  The challenge is allowing science and art to coexist while maintaining the objective integrity of science and the creativity of art.

After:

Fashion is a reflection of our societal state, evolving and changing in conjunction.  It is not uncommon for fashion and politics to cross paths. From political graphic t-shirts to modern cultural clothing, fashion is more than looking good; it’s about what it says to wear it.  Currently, one of the biggest waves in fashion is the crossing of gender norms.  Fashion is at the forefront of expressing gender on a wide spectrum, with women and men’s trends crossing aisles and androgenity all the rage. Gender is the way in which a person’s expression is interpreted by society, while sex deals with biological characteristics.  While gender is starting to be comprehended in a spectrum format, sex has historically been interpreted as binary using incorrect analyses of scientific observations of nature.  Even with the progress made for the rights of transgender and gender non-conforming individuals, sex remains a misunderstood concept. Just as fashion has aided in the expression and understanding of the gender spectrum, art of all forms is the key to solving myths about the binary construction of sex.  The challenge is allowing science and art to coexist while maintaining science’s objective integrity and the creativity of art.

Reflection:

I liked approaching my paragraph by looking for ways to simplify sentences. I noticed that by trimming down sentences even just a little bit, it allows for more complex sentences to shine. This exercise was also helping in finding ways to cut down my word count. My ideas are much clearer now because I only included aspects of sentences that were key to introducing my argument. I was also able to edit my thesis through this exercise.

Peer Review Paper #3

Begin your paper. You can have a brainstorm session: Choose your favorite brainstorming activity (“follow the thread,” clustering, columns, or free write) to help you decide on an angle you want to take when drafting this next paper. Please post evidence of this brainstorming activity into your post.

Thesis: Science allows us to understand how each other thinks, moves, and evolves, a desire to learn that is driven by the empathetic thinking that art lends us the tools to utilize. However, when not used together in balance, both art and science can be incompetent toward societal progression

Some Topic Sentences:

Art enhances the STEAM education by incorporating empathy and nurture into an otherwise emotionless field.

While science may be the key to the understanding of our bodies, it seems that art could potentially be what leads us to a greater understanding of our minds.

Scientific evidence has never had the ability to prove morality, a complex set of principles founded on our thinking.

The scientific facts tell us that sex is impossible to define as binary, yet politicians and government keep pushing to reshape facts to say otherwise.

Library Assignment

“The battle over trans rights is about power, not science”

In “The battle over trans rights is about power, not science”, doctoral candidate in history Beans Velocci writes about the issue of defining sex in biological terms, specifically as an opposition to transgender rights.  Velocci speaks specifically to how government has used scientific findings of biological differences in nature to justify social hierarchies. “Sex science” has been used to justify maintaining sociopolitical goals such as racial hierarchy, a strong military, or a sexually “normal immigrant population.  Overall, Velocci uses historical examples of how science has “proved” sexual differences to combat the Department of Health and Human Services’s proposal to define sex as binary and clearly distinguishable by science. Velocci presents examples of historical trends of how science has been used incorrectly to justify gender discrimination.  I chose this essay because it is a good example of how using science alone to solve an issue is not enough. Politicians and government officials have for too long catered scientific facts to fit their goals and beliefs. This essay highlights how science, when used in the humanities, is not enough proof for finding solutions. The issue of transgender rights is just one example of how focusing on scientific facts alone is not enough evidence to solve a problem or come to a definite conclusion, especially when facts can be so easily manipulated.

I can use this essay within my own argument in a couple of different ways.  Firstly, I could easily incorporate this essay into my naysayer paragraph. I could also dissect the main points of Ma and write a counter argument against one of his points about art always benefiting science with this essay.  This essay complicates any ideas that Art and Science work harmoniously together, so I can use it to fit a wide range of arguments. I could also incorporate this essay into a body paragraph with another one of the sources to directly support their quotes.  The examples that Velocci uses parallel to the Bohr and Picasso example, where history tells us a lot about what does and doesn’t work.

Beans Velocci is a doctoral candidate in history at Yale University.  The article was published on the Washington Post’s online publication on October 29, 2018.  Since it has been reviewed and put out relatively recently, I can trust that the information has been read over by an editor and meets the standards for what the publication deems as truthful.  Additionally, the Washington Post publishes a select amount of high quality work, not everything thrown their way. A doctoral candidate also has a lot of knowledge and authority in his field. Velocci sights several sources of evidence to prove his point and stays within the confines of an academic essay.  All of these factors about this essay combine to be reasons why it is a trustworthy academic source.

Naysayer Paragraph

Some critics of STEAM education argue that while art may be important, it is not fundamental to the furthering of technology development and scientific discovery. The scientific method is designed to avoid emotional biases and focus on straight observed facts. Lehrer uses the example of Bohr’s electron model being inspired by Picasso and the cubist movement as reasoning for why art should actually be integrated into the scientific process. Lehrer writes “(w)e need to find a place for the artist within the experimental process, to rediscover what Bohr observed when he looked at those cubist paintings”. Perhaps the way that art becomes a part of the experimental process is not actually within the experiment itself, but the designing and development of experimental questions or processes. It may not be the case that science needs art to change how it collects and interprets data, but it does need art to find new approaches and questions to answer about difficult topics to dissect like physics and neuroscience. Lehrer breaks down our current state of society into two cultures, science and art. According to Lehrer, “(i)f we want answers to our most essential questions, then we will need to bridge our cultural divide”. As the list of grand concepts that we have yet to scientifically discover shrinks, the items left on the list remain too difficult for our current systems. It seems as though integrating art could help give science a more creative approach to problem solving.

Write two paragraphs–one Barclay and one TREAC. Your Barclay can pair Lehrer with Yo-Yo Ma or it can pair Lehrer with a self-to-text, world-to-text “illustration.”

TREAC Format:

Art has already been integrated into much of scientific history. Most commonly we see evidence of poetic metaphors being used to develop or explain theories of physics. For Example, in “The Future of Science…Is Art?”, Jonah Lehrer explains how Bohr used cubist art to explain that electrons “were like one of Picasso’s deconstructed guitars, a blur of brushstrokes that only made sense once you stared at it”. Bohr’s artistic point of view led him to be able to reject the idea that electrons were like planets, and develop a more fitting and abstract metaphor for the complex theory of electrons. Without art itself and the development of artful metaphors, much of the understanding we have about scientific theories would not be able to be so easily explained. While it is true that the addition of art will improve collaborative efforts toward new discoveries, much of the “art” that is already contributing to science may be overlooked. Metaphors used to explain scientific processes, medical issues, and theories are all ways that art and creativity aid scientific understanding of the objective. We must not overlook the ways that art is already successfully collaborating with science when arguing for more concrete inclusion of art in science.

Barclay Format:

In order for science to continue progressing at the rate we have seen over the past century, human emotion needs to be reconsidered as critical to scientific understanding. In “Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy, and Education”, famed cellist Yo-Yo Ma depicts the importance of collaboration between science and art, critical thinking and empathetic reasoning. According to Ma, “purposefully seek(ing) to bolster the integrative feedback loops of our dual neural pathways could provide a new energy for creativity in our weary civilization”. In order to get the most out of scientific research, both neural pathways, critical thinking and empathetic thinking, need to be involved. While the brain can only activate one pathway at a time, collaboration between experts on each side of the spectrum can create ideas beyond just their way of thinking alone. It’s not just the artistic perspective that feels they have a place in science. In his essay from the perspective of the scientist, Lehrer writes that “(b)y heeding the wisdom of the arts, science can gain the kinds of new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific progress”. Lehrer agrees that this plateau in discovery can be resolved through collaboration with art and creativity. Many of the concepts left yet to be understood, such as the brain and the universe, requires more than just equations and scientific tests. The first-person perspective needs to be considered as a factor and possible solution to full understanding of ourselves. Perhaps it is time to take a look at these questions from a big picture, holistic point of view.

How are you achieving your annotation goals?

Revisit your notes on active reading and understanding context and do your best to describe each of the three contexts we’ve discussed in class. 1) What is the surrounding context for this essay? Where and when was it first published? Who wrote the essay, and what do you notice about the author’s bio? 2) What is the circumstantial context? What circumstances surround your personal reading experience? What is your purpose for reading this text? 3) Describe the intentional context. What is the rhetorical situation? What is the scope? What is the “so what?” Finally, please choose three unfamiliar words or references to look up. Define or explain those terms in your blog.

I am doing a better job of annotating with purpose. For instance, I am summarizing quotes that I have underlined next to them so that when I go back to look for quotes to use in my writing they are easier to find. Even if I am not necessarily going to use a quote, summarizing it is a good way to get an idea of where points are in the text. Overall, I am annotating with purpose now.

The surrounding context for this essay is that this essay was published in the same month that the actual publication was launched, January 2014. The publication the World-Post, which is a collaboration between liberal news source the Huffington Post and the Berggruen Institute on Governance. Yo-Yo Ma is an extremely awarded cellist, who traveled the world to perform. Ma is an advocate for STEAM education and global culture. The circumstantial context is reading this essay for the purpose of a multi-modal academic essay. I have some context on both Yo-Yo Ma and what STEAM education is, but not much. The intentional context is to explain the benefits of integrating art into science, and how their collaboration leads to a greater understanding of the world. Ma also explains the benefits of globalization to culture. There were not many terms that I did not know the meaning to, however, I looked up some terms to get a better understanding on why Ma included them.

The Enlightenment Era— European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that emphasized the use of reason to advance understanding

Globalization— how trade and technology have made the world into a more connected and interdependent place

Equilibrium— state in which opposing forces or influences are balanced

Read Chapter 8 in They Say/I Say “Connecting the Parts”–Complete exercise number 2 (at the end of the chapter). Post a screenshot or photo of your results on your blog and respond to each question. 

I definitely like to use pointing terms because I try not to use “this” or “that” by themselves. I am much better at including transitions at the beginning of paragraphs than I am in the middle of a paragraph to connect ideas. I do rely on terms like “however”, “while”, and “although” quite a bit. I repeat key terms a lot and maybe should look for places to use synonyms more often. I noted a spot where for about 4 sentences in a row I opened it with “Barry” which read very repetitively.