The purpose of COLL 300 is to connect you with people, places, and ideas that take you out of familiar surroundings and deepen the way you see yourself in the world. To introduce you to people and ideas that are outside your sphere of direct experience. To challenge your ways of thinking. To make you a little uncomfortable.
This Fall 2017, two of our Hispanic Studies Courses formed part of the COLL 300 on campus experience theme of In/Exclusion: HISP 330: Poetry Writing Workshop, taught by Professor Silvia Tandeciarz, and HISP 390: Queer Latinidad, taught by Professor Christina Baker.
In both HISP 330 and 390, students took on performative articulations of self-reflection throughout the semester by means of performance and poetry. These acts and refined pieces were showcased in the end-of-semester COLL 300 Academic Festival, held December 1st, from 2:00pm-5:00pm in ISC III.
Students in HISP 330, the Poetry Writing Workshop taught in Spanish, chose to feature their creative work in a “poetry walk.” Designed on large poster boards and curated along brightly light hallways, the poems brought effervescence and freshness to the space of ISC III. The display series of large poster boards, designed by the students, accompanied the installation with translations of their poems, and framed the exhibit with the following mission statement:
Students in HISP 390 performed an living wax museum of stereotypes called, “You Don’t Know My Life,” inspired by the Radical Performance Pedagogy of Guillermo Gómez Peña. The students each enacted a stereotype, performed only at the inducement of the public and at the end of the perofrmance, came together to break down walls of isolation and misunderstood identities. Our docent carried around our collaboratively created Artists’ Statement:
Here is a small gallery of other photos from the event:
