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. Taught in Spanish.
Credit to CSUMB Catalogue.
COURSE NARRATIVE:
This course held a depth like no other I have ever undertaken. The focus of this course was to create a consciousness of what a testimonial was. That is, not only to let us know what a testimonial was but to also make us aware of the crucial importance testimonials had to history. Through this course we learned of the various interpretations of the word truth. We learned there was the official, history acknowledged truth, and the truth that was provided through testimonials that may differ from the official or widely known truths. Through this course we learned of when and with what texts the genre that we were learning about, Hispanic Testimonials, came to be known. We learned that there were certain requirements that testimonials had to fulfilling order to be considered a testimonial. These requirements where that the testimonials had to be redacted through the first person, it had to be declaring a social injustice, the speaker had to be lacking in political power to voice their perspective, and they had to be speaking with a collective voice of 'I' (first person, but telling the tale suffered by a group or community). Through this course we considered different texts and even some documentaries to become aware of what testimonials looked and sounded like, these testimonials ranged from the earliest documented autobiographies of a slave in Cuba that was fortunate enough to be alphabetized by mere chance to the declarations made by suffering surviving students in Mexico after a horrifying ordeal only a few years ago in 2014.
After learning about the various topics that a testimonial. could undertake, we were assigned to various topics of aspects of life where people near us may be suffering with. Some of those topics were towards legal representation, immigration, residences, medical treatment and mental health. With these topics assigned to us, we were tasked with finding individuals who experienced some hardship that fit into these topics, interviewing them, and then compiling our own document that would serve as a testimonial of social injustices suffered by people. My team and I worked with someone, who suffered through medical treatment issues in our area, and created a short essay about their formation and experience.
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. Taught in Spanish.
Credit to CSUMB Catalogue.
COURSE NARRATIVE:
This course held a depth like no other I have ever undertaken. The focus of this course was to create a consciousness of what a testimonial was. That is, not only to let us know what a testimonial was but to also make us aware of the crucial importance testimonials had to history. Through this course we learned of the various interpretations of the word truth. We learned there was the official, history acknowledged truth, and the truth that was provided through testimonials that may differ from the official or widely known truths. Through this course we learned of when and with what texts the genre that we were learning about, Hispanic Testimonials, came to be known. We learned that there were certain requirements that testimonials had to fulfilling order to be considered a testimonial. These requirements where that the testimonials had to be redacted through the first person, it had to be declaring a social injustice, the speaker had to be lacking in political power to voice their perspective, and they had to be speaking with a collective voice of 'I' (first person, but telling the tale suffered by a group or community). Through this course we considered different texts and even some documentaries to become aware of what testimonials looked and sounded like, these testimonials ranged from the earliest documented autobiographies of a slave in Cuba that was fortunate enough to be alphabetized by mere chance to the declarations made by suffering surviving students in Mexico after a horrifying ordeal only a few years ago in 2014.
After learning about the various topics that a testimonial. could undertake, we were assigned to various topics of aspects of life where people near us may be suffering with. Some of those topics were towards legal representation, immigration, residences, medical treatment and mental health. With these topics assigned to us, we were tasked with finding individuals who experienced some hardship that fit into these topics, interviewing them, and then compiling our own document that would serve as a testimonial of social injustices suffered by people. My team and I worked with someone, who suffered through medical treatment issues in our area, and created a short essay about their formation and experience.
330_testimonio_.pdf | |
File Size: | 136 kb |
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