Reflections

Hello! By now, I have graduated Oberlin College, and am long overdue on my reflection post for this blog. I finished moving out of my studio, and boy has it been a tumultuous month. Pictured to the right is all the scrap wood I collected over the year with the intention of making another installation space with cloth walls, creating a room within the gallery for my final Senior Studio exhibition for my furniture and sculpture. In the end, all the installation and sculpture pieces had to be removed, and I decided on pairing my desk with a chair and plants borrowed from a classmate, and one of the pieces I submitted to the midterm show with some small adjustments and extra notes from the rest of the year, as a sort of capstone to my Oberlin Experience, which is the title of that piece. Even so,  I'm incredibly satisfied with what I have achieved over the year. I graduated with a full load of coursework and job experience within holistic learning, africana based pedagogy, and experience in art based teaching methods, tutoring, and leading creativity centered math workshops.

I really did end up leaving Oberlin having accomplished the goals I set out to complete. I may not have designed my own major around project based learning and holistic pedagogy, but I ended up finding a much more effective, and ironically enough, holistic path. I was able to learn about holism in education by experiencing it myself! My advisers, especially Professor Darko Opoku and Professor Caroline Jackson-Smith pushed me down the path of Africana Studies. Within the curriculum, was a deep tradition of scholarship on Africana philosophies and pedagogies. Not only were the theories and practice the professors at Oberlin taught exactly the kind of education I had been searching for, but they one upped me in so many ways by immersing me in a deep historical understanding of Black activism, thought, and culture. Critical Race Theory fits perfectly into explaining how the American education system was never meant to benefit students of color, and in many ways serves to continue generations of oppression. There is much more I could speak on, but to keep this post to the point, see some of the ideas I learned about during my four years at Oberlin in my Africana Studies Capstone.

I unexpectedly ended up experiencing the exact kind of education I hope to one day facilitate because of the Visual Arts major. I felt this to be especially true this last year as I completed the Senior Studio course along with my final Capstone and coursework for my Africana Studies major. Through building furniture I was able to process and better understand the ideas I was learning at a rapid pace in my Africana Studies Senior Seminar. I also was learning a useful trade, and an understanding of basic engineering principles and how to build pretty much anything, the exact skills I hope to use in a classroom to teach in the pedagogic tradition I was learning in the more traditional academic setting.

I hope to some day soon be able to custom build my own classrooms, so that every aspect of the space is part of the learning experience. I know this ambition is large, and very hard logistically, but I've been told my whole life to dream big and radically for the world we need, and then keep fighting to make that dream a reality. Oberlin served to deepen these beliefs, and brings me right back to the goals I set out for myself in the beginning of the year. In the end, of course I didn't stay small and focused. But I did keep myself in a much more realistic constraint as I planned and realized my projects.

I abandoned for the time being many plans and ideas I had, as well as created many mock ups to gain a better understanding of the time it would take to build, install, and de-install my pieces. I wasn't entirely successful every step of the way, as you can see from my last blog I only finished the desk hours before needing to be done installing it, and still haven't finished installing the drawers, even thought they are fully constructed. I similarly only finished printing out the note cards for my Oberlin Experience piece half an hour before the show went up.

Even so, I feel like I was successful in the goals I set out to achieve for this course. I de-installed my projects on time, cleaned out my studio, and cleaned up the spaces as I used them much better than I have in the past. I feel like I grew a lot as an artist. I still have more improvements to make, but I have a much, much better understanding of time tables, space usage, and planning my process efficiently as well as collaborating with others and sharing spaces. I asked for much more help, and gave help to others in my class. I definitely feel like I accomplished the goal of integrating my art practice into all aspects of my life. I learned a lot of skills in using all the shop equipment effectively and quickly for many different uses, I learned a lot of joinery techniques, and a lot of the structural intricacies of furniture making. I gained the skills I needed to teach in my ideal learning environments, and I applied some of the principles as I learned them to my tutoring work and my work with the DuBois Math Club. I didn't end up building the jewelry box or utilizing the scrap wood I had, but I still plan to use those for future projects. I may post some sneak peeks out of my notebook in the future. I feel ready to build strong community spaces, and spread curiosity through creating and exploring. Next year I will be working through Americorps with the Ninde Scholars program at the Oberlin High School, and hope to incorporate much of what I learned in my counseling work.

In the future I hope to continue working in after school and classroom settings, in maker spaces, and at community events teaching skills like furniture building infused with the pedagogical practices I learned from my Africana Studies major. I hope to build holistic and inclusive learning spaces for anyone in the community, where everyone is having fun, and through that joy and unity, learning! My experience at Oberlin and over this last year was very hard, but now I see it as an intensive boot camp to get me prepared with all the skills and knowledge I need to fight to make my dreams reality. I hope I can keep walking down this path, and will make sure to share big updates with you as they come! I'll leave you with a late night logo I made on snapchat of a non profit idea I dreamed up back in high school. The more fleshed out logo is on the front page of this site. Send me a message by email or facebook if you want to hear more about it!