https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5 en-us 2022-07-07 01:34:03 UTC 2022-07-07 02:11:58 UTC hello@padlet.com shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238503739 In pre-school we had a Spanish teacher who would come in occasionally and teach us basic words in Spanish. These are the three that I always remembered. ]]> 2022-07-07 01:38:01 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238503739 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238504534 I asked my mom to tell me Sleeping Beauty as my bedtime story every night for over a year. When we could, we would go to the library and rent the 1959 Disney film on DVD. ]]> 2022-07-07 01:38:54 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238504534 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238506029 In second grade we had a classroom library with brand new books. Our teacher announced that each week she would pick a star student who could choose a book and take it home with them for a week and be the first one to read it. I remember I was the first student who got to pick out a book, and I chose The Mitten by Jan Brett.]]> 2022-07-07 01:40:36 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238506029 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238506847 My mom bought the Crow Boy by Taro Yashima for me because she liked the art style. It is the first book I remember reading by an Asian American author. I remember feeling very moved while reading it because the main character was an outcast. There was a copy of it in our school library. When I showed it to one of my classmates she said the art style was weird and scary. ]]> 2022-07-07 01:41:33 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238506847 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238509012 Every student in the third grade had to do a speech from the perspective of a historical figure. I chose Amelia Earhart because she disappeared under mysterious circumstances and I’ve always loved a good mystery. We were encouraged to dress up like our historical figure, and I was extremely committed to my performance. I practiced it to the point of near memorization. I even wore swim goggles as aviator goggles and didn’t take them off my entire speech. ]]> 2022-07-07 01:43:50 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238509012 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238511372 My Popo (grandma) spoke Cantonese and English. None of her children spoke Cantonese and she didn’t speak Cantonese with me. However, I would hear her switch into it when we went to the store, or the Chinese-owned bakery, or when ordering dim sum, or gossiping on the old landline with my Aunt May.]]> 2022-07-07 01:46:02 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238511372 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238513214 In fourth grade my class got to go to the San Francisco opera house to watch La fille du Régiment. I don’t remember much about the plot, but I do remember the experience of going to the opera. We were told to dress formally, so I wore my favorite dress, which was actually very colorful and not the most opera appropriate attire. It was impressed upon me that the opera was a sophisticated space that you had to dress a certain way to be accepted into. ]]> 2022-07-07 01:48:01 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238513214 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238513796 My favorite store as a tween was Borders Books. I would go straight to the manga section and read volumes cover to cover while my parents did their errands.]]> 2022-07-07 01:48:38 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238513796 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238514476 Every space was a reading space. In my room, on the giant bean bag at Popo’s house, at my Uncle Randy’s house before Thanksgiving dinner was served, at restaurants, at the laundromat, in school sitting at my desk waiting for the first bell to ring. I took a book everywhere. Even on the long car rides back and forth between Sacramento, when reading induced car sickness, I taught myself to take breaks when I felt the nausea coming on. Every space was a reading space. ]]> 2022-07-07 01:49:16 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238514476 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238515673 In high school I volunteered to be a curator for our annual art show. It was our responsibility to examine all the visual art submitted and arrange them spatially within a theme of our choosing. I learned that not all texts for analysis are written passages. In the process of curation, I exercised my ability to critically consume my peers’ work and simultaneously produce a cohesive work for new viewers.]]> 2022-07-07 01:50:27 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238515673 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238516392 Chemistry was the class I struggled the most with in high school. I enjoyed Biology and liked balancing equations in Math, but the language of Chemistry seemed alien and inaccessible to me.]]> 2022-07-07 01:51:16 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238516392 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238517694 This short essay has stayed with me for years. I related to the anger and disdain Kincaid wrote about when becoming disillusioned about England after years of colonial education. It was around this time that, like her, I was becoming disgusted with blind nationalistic pride and becoming more critical of the legacies of American and English imperialism. ]]> 2022-07-07 01:52:39 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238517694 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238518070 My name, without any Anglicization, written on a piece of paper in my uncle’s handwriting the summer I went to Ireland for the first time.]]> 2022-07-07 01:53:02 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238518070 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238519288 Something that stood out to me in the Vazquez et al text was the need for students to participate in the production and sharing of texts in order to develop their critical literacy. Editing videos is a skill I picked up in college which decisively reveals how texts are not neutrally constructed. As the video editor, I held the power over how words and contexts were presented in order to construct narrative meaning. ]]> 2022-07-07 01:54:23 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238519288 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238520076 I took a class on myth and image for my capstone thesis seminar. It was a class of only five students including myself, the smallest class I had since starting college. Our eccentric professor focused on Athenian vase painting and emphasized that even the smallest or most overlooked of details held a great deal of significance because the people of the time were not dependent on written text and were instead highly visually literate societies. This shifted the way I interpreted the term literacy. I wrote my capstone thesis about evolving visual representations of the mythic figure Medea, and how Athenian vases and Roman reliefs used visual symbolism to portray her as a foreigner. ]]> 2022-07-07 01:55:15 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238520076 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238521037 I think watching David Cronenberg’s The Fly when I was seven is the reason I love horror movies. Movies are an incredibly dynamic piece of text which take months of labor and thousands of people to create a distilled vision in roughly under two hours. I wrote my final paper about John Carpenter’s 1982 cult-classic The Thing, which was critically panned in its initial theatrical release because critics and audiences read it as a sci-fi film rather than a body horror film. I’ve always enjoyed analyzing and critiquing movies, particularly horror movies, but a film class on horror as a genre opened my mind to the ways in which genres themselves can be transformative and undefinable. ]]> 2022-07-07 01:56:19 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238521037 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238525316 A couple of friends and I started a short lived book club. This was one of the books we read, and it truly altered how I saw the world and how I saw my feminist practice. ]]> 2022-07-07 02:00:41 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238525316 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238531067 I first got into making zines in college. Most of the time they were silly. During the early months of the pandemic I had a wealth of free time on my hands, and I committed myself to making multiple reflective, time intensive zines. As an artist and a writer, I appreciate the control I have over zines to synthesize both mediums into one product for reading/viewing.]]> 2022-07-07 02:06:00 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238531067 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238531375 2022-07-07 02:06:22 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238531375 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238533045 When UCLA went remote, the campus magazine I was a part of was restricted from printing and distributing our quarterly issue. Instead we shifted to a virtual website issue, which I designed.]]> 2022-07-07 02:08:12 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238533045 shannon_boland1 https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238536733 This is the piece of writing I am most proud of. In my last quarter at UCLA, I took a class on adaptations of Sophocles’ play Antigone. It’s wrought with themes of struggle against authority, othering, fate, burial rites, and familial conflict. For my final project, I decided to follow in a long literary tradition and write my own adaptation. I set my adaptation in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the year 1900, during the first outbreak of the bubonic plague in the continental United States. Like the Athenians, I was writing about the present under the backdrop of the past. It was 2020, the first year of the pandemic, and anti-Chinese media headlines were at a high. I was moved to respond to a series of xenophobic, sensationalist articles by repudable newspapers broadcasting a single case of bubonic plague in China without mentioning that the United States gets an average of 10-20 cases each year. In the context of the initial wave of the COVID-19 outbreak, I saw this as clickbait fear mongering following a historical pattern of othering non-white countries and their inhabitants as carriers of disease. Relying on texts like archived newspapers, political cartoons, photographs, early 20th century writers, ancestry records, maps, scientific journals, and American legislation on immigration, I immersed myself into my setting. Using Sophocles’ characters and making them my own, I wrote a 109 page screenplay which I titled Antigone in Chinatown. After I turned my final in, my professor encouraged me to submit my work for Undergraduate Research Week. My research was awarded with a Dean’s Prize in Research and Academic Excellence. I cherish this piece of narrative writing more than any other academic essay I did in undergrad. ]]> 2022-07-07 02:11:53 UTC https://padlet.com/shannon_boland1/ovcr4nl44tfj09x5/wish/2238536733