What I learnt in class/ Bonus Assignment

The class was a great “journey” for me. I have never studied feminism and when I started the class I felt not in place. Talking about feminism and gender discrimination was something that I have never discussed with my friends. It is always hard to talk about feminism as every person has their own vision and experiences on the topic.
What I learnt in the class is to accept feminism of something that cannot be explained with a sentence or several sentences. Feminism can offer main ideas and concepts and can give examples from the history or people’s stories but there is not a clear way of perceiving male-female relationship or to explain why women act in a certain way or men in another.
I learnt to express my ideas in a blog. It was a great way of getting to know some other people in the class. Reading ideas of others, made me realize that I think like some other people in the class as well as how different I am from other people. I even expressed my thoughts of some class discussion on the blog, trying to give my opinion on some of the class responds.
The beginning of the course made me interested in the way the course is lead. My trip to the Capitol and meeting with Davey D. and Rosa was great for me. Somehow, my car broke the same day but it is just luck. There is much that I took from the meeting with Davey D, who really intrigued me with his story how radio advertisement works and how everything is based on the money. Rosa thought me on how you can become an official party in US and what does that mean. It was a great experience and I took a lot out of the trip.
Another big thing that I learnt is to look for specifics topics in media. I was not searching for certain titles connected with feminism and for the journal I was intrigued with reading feminism titles across Internet and newspapers. I got interested in several articles in MacWeekly as well, which surprised me and were very much adding to the course. The media journal helped me to pick a topic for my media paper and my final paper as well. I learnt to search for potential topics anywhere and I figured out that if you have in mind something, it is much easier to find it in media. There is so much information (most of it useless) that goes through media, so you should know what you search for in order to be able to find it and use it.
Learning more about feminist concepts and ideas brought me interest in learning more about how my identity connects with feminism and how I perceive feminist ideas. That combined well with feminist and Hip-Hop. I like rap music and I usually don’t put a lot of effort into examining the lyrics. The lyrics are not important as the beat and the popularity. At the same time it meant a lot to me to look at the lyrics from a different point of view.
Next thing I learnt was something that shocked me: it was the way that Hip-Hop artist act in their videos. I have seen many of these videos and I have always accepted everything as normal hip-hop video – well that is not right. I have never thought how that does change my perspective and how it changes women perspective. Dreamworld 3 is a great movie and I really found it amusing. I couldn’t agree with some parts but I learnt that I need to spend some time watching some educational videos on the topic in order to get to know a different perspective.
Definitely my favorite part of the semester was when we had Desdemona and Maria Isa. They brought a different light in the class. They told me a lot of a world that I didn’t know that exists and I have never searched for it. Both of them were great and I thought that they have great talent.
I learnt that there are classes that can “work” better if people sit in a circle as well as that one person can bring a message not with words by with using positioning people in a special way. It went much more successful that I thought and I would use it in future as I thought it is fun as well. I think it could be a good team-built activity.
The last part that I will mention is the skills I obtained using the screen-pilot program, taking screen shots from YouTube commercials and writing an AdBust… it was a lot of fun and I think that it made me much more aware of different commercial and the stereotypes used in them.