Major Inquiry Project So Far...

So far, we've made a lot of progress with our major inquiry projects. I turned in my pieces of rhetoric to Dr. Minslow. My paper is going to go very well and I'm pretty sure that making my portfolio will be very fun.

Next week we will begin working on outlines and gathering more information for our persuasive papers. I think there is a ton of helpful information for my topic but I don't want it to be too broad. I can't decide on whether or not I want my paper to be solely based on children in abusive domestic situations or if I want to work on how men, women, and children in abusive domestic situations. I think I will work on the latter due to the fact that I can express every thing that I want to without having to limit myself so much.

Pieces Of Rhetoric

I had a lot of ideas for my pieces of rhetoric that I would make for my NPO and I decided I will do all of them and then narrow it down when I'm finished. So far I've made one of the posters and a bumper sticker, next is a wordle and another poster idea that I have. A lot of good ideas were shared in our peer review groups.

Lately, the thing that needs to be focused on the most is my research paper. Everything for the most part is laid out I just need to put it all together. We were introduced to what will be needed for our portfolios and resources that we could use to make them. The portfolio looks like it will be really fun to work on.

The majority of our time lately has been spent working with our project groups and deciding what we are going to use as our two types of rhetoric for our NPO's. I decided to change my topic from veteran homelessness and have made a lot more progress. After sharing ideas with my group-mates I clearly understand what I want to do now. Dr. Minslow has given us great ideas on what to use as online resources and reminded us to keep working on those research papers. My to pieces of rhetoric will be bumper stickers and a posters, I have the ideas already laid out for how I want them to look so that shouldn't be much of a problem. These two pieces of rhetoric wil go great, hopefull I wont have to change NPO's.

Collage

How does this collage represent my identity?

This collage shows the things that I care the most about in my life and special memories. I had a lot of fun picking the pictures but found it a little difficult to narrow it down to which photos I actually wanted to represent who I am. The first picture is my puppy, Buddy. We used to be stuck like glue and were always together having fun; he was what cheered me up when I was down and made my day. The picture of the Bible represents my religion because it is very important to me. The violin and poetry have been passions of mine for as long as I can remember, and there's a picture of my friend HT's party a couple weekends ago. These things give an idea of who I am or what I stand for, things that people probably wouldn't know just from me introducing myself. Pictures are worth a thousand words and just these few do an okay job of describing who I am.

What are the links between images and identity and our society? What types of images do identify with?

Pictures in society represent what we want our reality to be. We associate things in photographs with the way our lives our supposed to be lived and try to alter the way we do things or record our lives through photographs to how we've seen others in our everyday lives. Like the Dove ad that we watched in class shows, many photographs can have different impacts on how we think and change our lives. The types of images that I identify with the most would be things like manga, abstract, religious, or things like my friends and I having fun together.

“America 24/7: A Family Photograph Album”

I'm assuming the exhibit will have pictures of the American flag, Presidents,old history, fast food places, or old rock and roll. Essentially these are things that could also describe the old America but are used to describe for the most part the way that things are today. In order to capture the essence of American character in communities the photographer needs a vast variety of backgrounds and areas because there are different definitions of the words, "American Culture".

I wasn't surprised to see Abraham Lincoln or Native Americans paddling on a lake, but I think the photographer really captured culture by adding in photos of Mexican American children, a woman doing yard work, or a young girl posed in front of a mirror caring a lot about prom and her appearance. These are things that for the most part are what the "new" American culture is about . Technology, appearances, and independence are what now represent us and the photographer and Patrick Cox did a remarkable job capturing it in mere photos.

This picture is pretty self-explanatory. Dr. Minslow asked us to find a picture that we felt represented America and described it in a photograph. This photograph shows the main corporations that everyone knows about and that pretty much run the economy. In a weird way our fate is in the hands of the corporations. These corporations on the flag are replacing the importance of the stars that are meant there and the people that the stars represent. This is a photo that in some ways represents America the best to me.

Reality

So, our homework assignment for this weekend is to post an unedited picture of us doing something everyday. As I am a fan of dental hygiene I easily chose brushing my teeth. Don't laugh to hard! XD