In the beginning of the second term, us SL students started briefly looking into the context of the novel we are required to read, Matigari by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. We had to compile a brief list of information related to the author, and we listed down the cultural origins of the story, where my groupmates said that Matigari is based on the word of mouth story of a man in search of a healer named Ndiiro to treat his illness. We also took note of the historical events that took place before and during Matigari's publication date. Matigari was published during the Presidency of Daniel Arap Moi in Kenya, and there was political unrest and only one political party to vote for, the Kenya African National Union. Many Kenyans were censored or imprisoned for stating concerns. Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote and published the book while in exile from Kenya. We compiled this in a "Universe" document, and although rudimentary, I learned a bit more about the decisions informing Ngugi wa Thiong'o's writing.
Political Cartoons (Brookes, Darymple, Harrison, Man)
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In this week, we learned about the conventions of political cartoons, with one of our groups in class using the Louis Darymple from Puck and Harry Harrison from South China Morning Post cartoons, and our group using the Peter Brookes from the Times and Kiko Man from the Manila Times cartoons. All four of these publications cover issues from different parts of the world, including Great Britain, China and other countries with Chinese communities in Asia, the United States, and our own country. We understood right away that political cartoons often require understanding the context. Without the context, our group and I struggled to grasp the Peter Brookes' entries in particular. The common features we did notice in these political cartoons were dialogue, line weight variation, hyperbole, irony, exaggeration, and symbolism, like in Harry Harrison's works where he uses more weighted lines on the characters in the forefront, and in Brookes' comics where they compare Trump to an elephant that spouts excrete and another local politician to a vampire bat with an oversized right wing. They are also typically shorter, with fewer panels. These features make political cartoons unique from other types of comics.
Paper 1 Group Practice - Political Cartoons (Kiko Man)
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After learning about the typical conventions of a political cartoon, I and the people who assigned to my group of three people had to apply what we learned about visual analysis, political cartoons, and Paper 1, and apply it to a practiced version of Paper 1. We chose the editorial cartoon by Kiko Man released on January 3, 2023, on the onion shortage in our country. We had to formulate the thesis statement by looking at the authorial choices and understanding how the choices affected us, the viewers, and connect it to the larger implications or statements about Philippine society or our community at large. The first paragraph gives a brief summary of the text's most important features, like the expression of the lady, the color, and dialogue, and while we stated purpose, there was little about the implications of the cartoon. If I had to rewrite this now, I would think that because of the hysterical expression, the dialogue, and the satire, while it clarifies the effects of the shortage on workers, I also believe it indicates that the government ignores or minimizes the effects of the shortage and inflation by equating the cause of her hysteria with just cutting onions instead of their price. I say the government because the figure asking her if the crying is from her onion is left ambigious and offscreen, as if someone else who could help her does not fully understand the reason she is so frantic. Working on paper 1 in a group setting, while helping with teamwork, also allowed me to learn how to clarify my points and sync them with the other paragraphs.
At Home and Abroad: Nineteenth-Century Textbooks and the Creation of Christian Citizenship in the US and the Philippines
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This week, after discussing political cartoons, we were guided through a post colonial journal article written by Susan K Harris for Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. The article, titled At Home and Abroad: Nineteenth-Century Textbooks and the Creation of Christian Citizenship in the US and the Philippines, is an article about the influence of 1800s textbooks on American and Philippine identity and how it became associated with Christianity. We covered the first section of the article, which establishes the authors' curiosity on the subject, and the history of how textbook publishers got the ability to publish the textbooks in the way they did. From the guided analysis, we learned how to use the Point Illustration Explanation (PIE) and relearned basic sentence structure and syntax to analyze the functions of each noun and verb in the text. This was to see how the syntax contributed to the point, illustration, and explanation and further establishes the purpose of the author's choice of words. Most of the reading in this week was guided practice, but we had time to process it with our smaller groups in the class. It was a primer for the next activity, which was that we needed to analyze the paragraphs in the second and third sections on our own.
Reading on Harris
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We spent most of this week discussing the Harris text in a guided manner, with our teacher demonstrating further how to analyze the text and reading the text on our own during asychronous sessions. We learned how to annotate text using our hard copy of the paper and I specifically started with reading the second section on Producing the Christian Citizen: Textbooks and American Citizenship, pointing out the sentence structure, the main arguments, their illustrations, and how the illustration links to back to the argument. Annotating in this way helped me further understand how to read and absorb the information a text is giving me, and this information will help me when I need to analyze journal articles in the future.
Harris: Producing the Christian Citizen: Textbooks and American Citizenship
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Later on, moving past political cartoons, we discussed a journal article by Susan K Harris from the journal Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy. While we had been discussing the article in the weeks before, we were assigned to discuss the latter sections of the paper (Sections 2 and 3) and each group member was assigned to do at least 2 paragraphs from each section. Our group got the section Producing the Christian Citizen: Textbooks and the American Citizenship and I specifically got paragraphs 9 -10 on how the textbooks in the United States in the 1800s associated New England's history with the rest of the United States's history. Harris also discussed the erasure of native cultures and their association of uncivilizedness with the original cultures as a way to convince Americans that they were chosen by God and that this was their purpose as Americans. The text also stated that associating Christian and American identities starts early in childhood with simple symbols and books. Reading and discussing the text helped me analyze it and find the arguments of the author while clarifying and simplifying my explanations for the rest of the class.
Rivers of Blood
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This week, we reviewed for paper 1 again, this time with only a partner, a framework for time allocation during the test, and a new text type, at least in terms of IBDP Langlit: speeches. The conventions of a speech often include rhetoric and appeals to logic, emotion, and character, colloquial language, mentions of the audience, persuasive tactics such as bandwagoning and presenting yourself as an ordinary member of society, anecdotes, and a call to action. These were all present in the text we had to read, Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood, which I honestly found detestable. In our paper, we had to point out the main arguments, how they are shown, and the quality of the evidence given, and in this way we had to break down all of his statements. We needed to be clear, focused, unique, and have evidence from the text that would support our claims and evaluation. We all had to do this within an hour and 15 mins, with 20 minutes to brainstorm and outline, 40 mins to draft the essay, and 5 minutes to review. We did not finish our essay within the time limit, but we had two body paragraphs by the time we had to stop writing. However, when our teacher had to analyze what we wrote in front of everyone, we missed a major part of the paper 1 process, and that was telling us why we should care about it and the larger implications of the text. We should not have been afraid to discuss the obvious racism in Powell's speech, instead of just listing the purpose. We then went through another method of analyzing the paper by looking per paragraph and determining what Powell was really saying. It was a learning experience to write under crunch time and have it evaluated live, so everyone in the class could understand what we did and what we needed to improve for our upcoming test at the time.