Course Description: A course on individual and collective memoirs, diaries, confessions and traveling accounts. Students read and analyze written texts and films, keep journals, and create life writing or multimedia production in Spanish.
Course Narrative: This course went over what a testimonio is and what purposes testimonios serve in social justice and depiction of the social injustices. At its core a testimonio, testimony in English, is a first person narrative (Uses "I" or the collective "I" to represent one speaking for many) written by another person, that seeks to reveal the social injustices to a particular group of individuals. The course brought to attention that what is truth and how historians choose to talk about what is true and what is not. Besides the word truth, the word history was questions and how certain perspectives have dominated what history choses to acknowledge. We started the course off with controversial narratives that were banned by the governments in which they were written because they sympathized with the oppressed side and depicted the government officials and bureaucracy as irrationally cruel. After this, we analyzed autobiographies of slaves during the slave trade and although they brought awareness to social issues they were not considered testimonies because they were not written by someone else. Besides reading and understanding the contents and context of the text, the class focused on determining whether the texts were considered testimonies or not. We learned that it wasn't till the 20th Century that testimonies were categorized as its own form of literature. From this point on, we only read testimonies and soon learned to apply the interview methods and topics depicted in the famous testimonies to our own communities. My group and I focussed on education and how the education process discriminated English language learners despite all the efforts the districts try to boast about. This class opened my eyes to a new form of literature, but also to the hidden history found within all history. Our final project for the course can be found here. MLO1 & MLO3 were met with this course.
Course Narrative: This course went over what a testimonio is and what purposes testimonios serve in social justice and depiction of the social injustices. At its core a testimonio, testimony in English, is a first person narrative (Uses "I" or the collective "I" to represent one speaking for many) written by another person, that seeks to reveal the social injustices to a particular group of individuals. The course brought to attention that what is truth and how historians choose to talk about what is true and what is not. Besides the word truth, the word history was questions and how certain perspectives have dominated what history choses to acknowledge. We started the course off with controversial narratives that were banned by the governments in which they were written because they sympathized with the oppressed side and depicted the government officials and bureaucracy as irrationally cruel. After this, we analyzed autobiographies of slaves during the slave trade and although they brought awareness to social issues they were not considered testimonies because they were not written by someone else. Besides reading and understanding the contents and context of the text, the class focused on determining whether the texts were considered testimonies or not. We learned that it wasn't till the 20th Century that testimonies were categorized as its own form of literature. From this point on, we only read testimonies and soon learned to apply the interview methods and topics depicted in the famous testimonies to our own communities. My group and I focussed on education and how the education process discriminated English language learners despite all the efforts the districts try to boast about. This class opened my eyes to a new form of literature, but also to the hidden history found within all history. Our final project for the course can be found here. MLO1 & MLO3 were met with this course.