Literacies Project Final Reflection

While I struggled a bit with this project, I really enjoyed doing it and exploring different genres of communication. At first, I had no idea how to focus my literacy narrative (I'm still not sure I figured that out). So many things have influenced me and my literacies, that I didn't know what really counted as a literacy and what kinds of things I should focus on. So, I settled on what felt right - including a little bit of everything, since a little bit of everything has influenced me as a reader and writer. So my final piece felt a little unfocused, but a few people told me that it did what it was meant to do, it told about how I've become who I am. 

Next came the multimedia remix. I was pretty scared going into it, but I really enjoyed it. I used Windows Movie Maker, and quickly got all excited about making movies for different things. It was really fun to learn how to use the medium in a relatively low-stakes environment. I was allowed to LEARN. I'm pretty happy with the final product, although I know if I gain new skills making movies, I'll probably look back on it and think it's horrendous. I'm glad that I was forced to experiment and figure out how to move a textual piece into a visual/audio/etc. piece. 

Finally the creative remix. Creative writing and I are not good friends. It scares me, and I think I scare it too. So I decided to incorporate something I knew. I'm taking a Shakespeare class, and have studied Shakespeare throughout my academic career, so I decided to focus on form for this piece and create a poem in the style of a Shakespearean sonnet (minus the themes of love). Thus my piece was relatively restricted in that I had a rhyme scheme and a rhythm (iambic pentameter). So I took the main ideas from my narrative and put them in the poem. It was fun to mess around with poetry, even though I am no good at it. It taught me about the restrictions of form and content. 

Overall, I learned a lot about navigating between mediums and genres throughout the course of working on this literacies project. I also learned a lot about literacies as a concept, and what it means and its implications. I have a broader understanding of what influences us as readers and writers, and this is all knowledge I think I'll be able to integrate into my future endeavors. My favorite part was that this project allowed us to experiment with new things without worrying about grades. The fact that we tried was enough. I don't think I would ever have the guts to try something new like a video or a poem in a class where it would be heavily graded. Low-stakes environments like this are the best ways to learn, and I really benefited from the relaxed atmosphere in which we worked on these projects.