Building My Foundation

NARRATIVES OF IDENTITY

Some brief background information about NCLC 101, which was the first class that we took for our first year of college.

It explored how individual and cultural identities are shaped and communicated in many of the media that we read and see in our daily lives. the main purpose of NCLC 101 were as listed:

Our major goals for this learning community are to:

1. Deepen awareness and strengthen understanding of identity and its relationship to narrative.
2. Gain experience in examining identity through composing arguments and critiquing narratives in a variety of genres.
3. Analyze the ways specific literary devices contribute to the meaning of a text
4. Identify and evaluate the contribution of the social, political, historical, and cultural contexts in which a literary text is produced.
5. Improve oral and written communication skills.

Because this was the first class that I took as a freshman in college, it felt like I never exactly knew what would be discussed in the next class meeting. When we were assigned more than one reading for our next class, it was very nerve wrecking at first because I wouldn’t know exactly which article we would discuss first. As the class went on though things started to have their own rhythm and even the assignments became somewhat clearer and easier to understand.

I found that most of the writing assignments, were a bit easy because they mainly asked to think about the lens that the reading was written through or which type of lens it could be written with and how it would be more advantageous to read them through that certain lens.

I know that the paper that I enjoyed writing the most was my Research Paper, which also happened to be the assignment that I chose for my Conference assignment.

The main reasons that I enjoyed writing this paper was because I had some prior experience with reading one of Ernest Hemingway’s book, which was The Sun Also Rises. I found that it was a great opportunity to learn even more than what I had already learned about Hemingway.

VALUE COMPETENCY

My research paper helped me with the value competency by helping to better understand how actions are shaped by values. It would have been impossible for me to understand the lens that Hemingway used in his books without having looked up the time period that he grew in and understanding that the actions that he took and how the actions of others affected him.