Game for Change

http://philome.la/epdickerson/byu-married-life

I feel strongly about this because we, as a part of the small percentage of US college students who have married under the national average age, are objects of curiosity and almost derision:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2014/02/07/tying-knot-on-campus-at-brigham-young-university-one-fourth-students-are.html

http://college.usatoday.com/2015/02/27/many-college-couples-are-receiving-a-marriage-certificate-before-a-diploma/

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/10/15/college-marriage-facebook/2989039/

The funny part to me is that BYU is the focus of two of these articles, and in the third a reader commented at their surprise that BYU wasn't mentioned. We're obviously a top school when it comes to marriages, and yet we have very few of the accommodations other schools provide for married students (click here for evidence--warning: strong language). My game works against the negative mindset against young marriage as demonstrated in these articles. I tried to write it as honestly in my own voice as I could, to recreate the engagement I feel with the situation. I hope it draws attention to the sides of married life we don't tell single students about as we push them towards marriage: financial difficulty, time management, bad housing, and social exclusion. I mention this on the "debate" page of my game, but that last factor was the biggest surprise for me. When I got married, I expected some sort of induction into the social circle of married people, which I understood from BYU culture to be a much better social circle than that of singles. But the married circle doesn't exist. It's just me and my husband in our own little circle. The act of being alienated from my single friends, especially as my husband is so often at work, has actually been a negative impact on my life. If I could correct one social misunderstanding, it's that singles believe their married friends don't need them or want to spend time with them anymore. That's just not true. I hope my game demonstrates that.

Round Robin

Textual Poaching

Source image: 

"Poached" image: 

 Artist/teacher Statement:

I'm a very pale white woman. In popular art, this gender/race combination are usually portrayed as flawless images of beauty. We still do this today in our art, especially art used to advertise: flawlessness is a great motivator to spend money and inflict unhappiness on oneself. In my particular case, I've always been especially aware of the perfect skin in paintings, such as the glowing ivory tones of The Girl with the Pearl Earring. From my childhood I've suffered from cystic acne, and as a result have been a bit of a lab rat for different acne medications, having visited dermatologists regularly from age 12. In my poached image, I attempted to recreate the same image of the painting and added in (on my face) the medications (or at least some of them) I have taken and (on my hair) the side effects caused by those medications. While I initially felt isolated from this painting and its historical moment by recalling my struggle to meet society's standard of beauty, I realized more and more that women have always been laden with unrealistic expectations of beauty. The woman in this portrait doesn't look happy at all--maybe she had her own side effects of beauty. I think that this exercise would be useful in the classroom to help students stop feeling distanced by space and time from characters in novels or plays, or even the authors of those works: the human experience is shared and similar. This assignment helped me to feel understood and connected to the woman in the painting, as well as other women throughout history. 

Process study

I enjoyed working with the time-lapse medium. In this case, I set the camera on my laptop to take a picture every two seconds, and used software called Time Lapse Tool to compress over 10,000 images into a period of just under 3 minutes. In retrospect, I could have set the camera to capture a picture every five or ten seconds, and I think that would have been better--it was impossible to comply to the 1-2 minute time limit in the assignment because I had too many exposures (originally there were nearly 12,500). But I think that the video very honestly and completely captures my process as a seamstress. 

I chose sewing because I imagined it was something I could do quickly, but I was wrong. Had I selected a different project I might have been done sooner, but the dress took nearly eight hours to complete. While I enjoy sewing, sewing under pressure is extremely stressful for me--I count myself fortunate that the medium does not allow to hear nor see well the moment that I had to unpick my zipper, because due to lack of time and sleep I became very upset at my mistake. I enjoyed this opportunity to explore the line between sewing as an entertaining and fulfilling hobby vs sewing as a frustrating and lengthy chore. 

Medium Specificity

I am comfortable with photography; however, that comfort comes from trust in myself, rather than my instrument. I have taken classes and studied other photographers’ work in order to arrange my subjects, manipulate light, and edit my photographs with appropriate software. Having worked as a photographer in both amateur and professional settings, I didn’t believe there was much for me to explore in this field. However, I used this project as an opportunity to rely on my camera. I set the shooting mode to a continuous frame, meant for sports or fast movement, and did nothing else to adjust the camera’s automatic settings. I directed my friends to play in the snow, and I followed them with my finger down on the shutter button. I did not look through my viewfinder, I did not set up shots, I did not offer direction to the subjects—I just allowed the camera to capture them.

I feel fortunate to have had this new perspective on camera work. In comparison to the two staged photographs on the blog, the other photos captured real emotion. People put on a different face when they know a moment is intentionally being frozen in time. By keeping the camera lowered, I photographed without creating pressure and ended with photographs that, while being out of focus and poorly framed, show joy, love, friendship, and fun. I was overjoyed to find that art does not only occur because of the micromanagement of an artist, especially when portraying real lives. 

Full album: https://goo.gl/photos/RFsDPHeCp3nHYd7Q7

Digital and Social Media Adaptation

Please follow link to a pinterest board :)

https://www.pinterest.com/empicks/ode-to-an-orange/

I feel like this is a great way to allow students to connect to something unfamiliar, like a literary text, through a medium they are comfortable with. What I liked best about this form is that we had to think about what the short story was saying and tell that same story. It would have been easier to illustrate the action with pictures or film a reading, but the jump to adding another level with the same story is what made the project unique and the application very helpful.

I would love to use this kind of project with my students. Furthermore, I would love to have them use their own social media accounts so that their work would be available to friends, followers, subscribers, etc. Their work would become more meaningful to them and would provoke thought as others could like, share, and comment on their work.

Thinking and Writing About Digital Media

As a Millennial, I spent my formative years trusting that the answers to any of life's questions could be found on a computer. This belief intensified as I entered adulthood and obtained a smartphone, meaning that the endless resources of digital media all fit in my pocket. I love the stories told through movies and long form television, so I am often drawn to Netflix and similar sites. I use Facebook to remain semi-informed on the lives of friends who live far away and the current events posted to my news feed (the only source of news that I consume, as I avoid newspapers and news sites generally) and Instagram to stay connected to my family, who all post there regularly. I turn to Pinterest often for creative ideas and new recipes.  

On the whole, I believe that my interaction with digital media is about satisfaction. If I want to know something, I only need to google it or ask Siri. Often, I won't read the entire article or page that is suggested. I scan through until I find out what to know and then I move on. For this reason I loathe news videos--they talk too slowly and I can't skip to the essential information. If I want to alleviate boredom, I usually open Facebook or Instagram and allow my mind to shut down a little as I scroll through other people's lives. Since a large portion of my friends on Facebook are people I knew in high school or people who friend requested me after my mission in Honduras, I don't know exactly who most of them are anyway. I would minimize my friend count, but removing friends en masse is the most inconvenient function on Facebook. My husband also taught me his trick of opening the "Videos You May Like" tab on Instagram, which also serves for temporary mindlessness. It worries me that what I require to be satisfied is a high mental stimulus in order to produce a very low mental response, like I am practicing shutting my brain off. Yet that seems to be the goal of a majority of the digital media I have encountered. 

This said, I am grateful for a religious upbringing that encouraged personal integrity, and has enabled me to avoid media that would prove detrimental. I know that my students' media consumption will probably be greater than mine, so I hope to help them establish their own standards for what they will allow on their phone or computer screen and what they will scroll past. Moreover, I hope to help my students understand the practice of meta-cognition. As I become more dependent on digital media, I lose my ability to focus on real life conversations, like college lectures or even conversations with friends. I predict this problem will only worsen for my students. I hope to help them to put their phones down and interact more with their physical circumstances than with the virtual world.