DANA VIGUE: When I enrolled in this course,
I expected it to be a traditional one
professor, large population of students sort of dynamic
in a seminar style.
But what I found was that we had half a dozen
different professors or more over the course
of the semester.
And I've never been in a class in that style before.
So it was a new environment for learning.
And I wasn't sure how what we learned in class day to day
would be able to carry over in a cohesive way
as we switched lecturers, but what
I found was that a common thread was woven
throughout the course of the semester,
and that thread drew from diverse individuals who
have expertise in diverse fields of study,
and who have used that expertise in diverse ways
to work and collaborate with, again, diverse groups of people
throughout the world.
And I think that ended up being the central theme of the class,
that the black experience, you know,
this sort of overused phrase that we might hear just
as colloquially is monolithic compared
to the diversity of experiences that this class was
able to demonstrate to each of us.
ELENA ALBERTI: Bouncing off of that,
I think something that was also interesting
was not only the multitude of voices in the professors,
but the multitude of different voices within the student
population.
When we were introducing ourselves,
I think most of us are different majors,
and we also come from different backgrounds
and different ethnicities and different sexualities
and genders.
And I think having such a group discussion
with different professors allows you
to get a lot of different perspectives,
not only from the professorial side,
but from the student experience and what you're experiencing
here as different individuals.
LORRAINE WONG: Yeah, I really appreciated
the different courses of everyone in the class,
but also in the professors, so some of our guest lecturers
were from women's and gender studies, or CMS, which
is comparative media studies, writing, literature,
so we had all these different perspectives, like Fox
Harrell's Phantasms and the virtual reality project,
to Professor Helen Elaine Lee's writing workshops,
and when we had to delve deep into what our parents taught us
and how we were raised, and all these things.
And I think each of them brought such important facets
to the conversation that we could explore
within ourselves and within the outer world,
and how black matters isn't just anthropology or just history
or something, but it's all of these different things, which
is why it's so important to the real engagement.
COLIN GODWIN: Yeah, it was like each speaker brought
a different view on emancipatory literacy to the class,
and just showed us the different ways
we could dissect everything we see.
ELENA ALBERTI: Also, I think hearing
from the different professors also, as a sophomore,
opens me up to taking more classes in different areas.
I didn't realize how many actual parts go into this class,
because I remember when I was looking through the class
list it's like, oh yeah, this counts
for CI-H, HASS-A, like everything.
And I was like, why?
And then you realize, with all the different professors.