In my Foundations of Language and Literacy course the big assignment of the semester is a case study inspired by Stevie Wonder's song "Living In The City". The purpose of the assignment is to study a person, place, thing, or group using ethnographic methods so that at the end of the year the class can see what I find out about what I want to study. For this project, I am going to study the minority experience at the College of Charleston. More specifically, what it is like to be a African American person attending a predominantly white institution (PWI).
My topic of choice is inspired by me being a minority, recognizing the college's false advertisement of diversity, and the events going on in America dealing with race currently. I am of mixed race but identify as African American on paper. Why? Well, when my ethnicity is broken is down, I am more African American than I am of any other ethnic group. So being that I am a minority, have experience with being judged because of my ethnicity, have family and friends that know what it is like to be Black in America, and fight for social equity and equality, it only makes since that I study the African American Experience at the college. I spend 90% of my life on the college's campus so I am always surrounded by the school's demographics. I see and experience first hand what it is like to be a minority at a school where one is lucky if he/she is not the only person like them in the classroom. In the end, I honestly could not imagine studying anything that I would feel more passionate about than the African American experience at the College of Charleston. I think my case study research will affect my perception of the Sapir- Whorf Hypothesis by giving me diverse and hopefully unique answers to my questions. Being that I am interviewing College of Charleston students, their answers should reflect their level of education though they may come from different socioeconomic backgrounds. Maybe students that speak using Standard American English will say their experience at the college has not been that bad due to the fact that they speak "normal". Then there are those that have an accent/dialect so it is possible they have had a more difficult time trying to acclimate to the white social standings on campus. The following on research questions that I am going to ask:
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BryannaFuture educator who is taking the world by one mind, heart, and story at a time. Archives
January 2017
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