The idea that I had originally had for this project ended up requiring a lot of time to do and was actually kind of hard to incorporate into the topic of discourses, so I ended up choosing my current topic. My main goal for this project was to show the shock that can come from going to a rather isolated situation that is homeschooling, to a crowded, highly social environment that is public schooling. I really enjoy making videos, but for this project, I decided that it would be best for me to create a podcast because of the time constraints I had, and I also did not think that I would fine enough clips to go with my video, so a podcast ended up just working out for me.
To create my project, I used Adobe Audition to edit all of my audio clips and used my Blue Snowball microphone to record all of my voice overs. Since my podcast takes the form of a podcast, I wanted to get some relaxing music go to behind my voice, so I decided to take some music from one of my favorite game series, Pokémon. For a few of the reading/watching assignments that we had in class, I would say that my favorites were definitely the videos and the podcasts that we had to watch and listen to and this was one of the reasons that I decided to create a podcast. My favorite podcast that I listened to was probably “Yo, Is This Racist?”, this was my favorite because, despite having a rather serious topic, the hosts were laid back and charismatic, which is how I tried to structure my own podcast ( “Language Evolves (w/ LeVar Burton).” . I really do not like when a podcast or video is really monotone and boring, despite having an interesting topic, so I tried my best to make sure that my podcast did not end up that way.
For my topic, it was actually very personal to me because of how much this change from homeschooling to public school affected my life. Because I was homeschooled, you could say I was a part of a homeschooling discourse, but it mostly felt like I was not really a part of any discourses at all, which is why the change to public school was so stressful, because I was thrown into a world of numerous discourses and was forced to either learn and adapt, or be considered an outcast. This is where I drew one of my connections to one of the texts that we read for class, that being Marlene Martinez’s “Tongue of Lead”. The thing that I related to the most in this was the subject of feeling like an outcast in school, though it was for a slightly different reason than Martinez (Martinez, M). For Martinez, the cause for her feeling like an outcast was her not knowing the language that everyone around her could speak, but for me, my reasoning for feeling like an outcast was because I was the new kid in a new, public school for the first time, so I naturally felt like it was somewhere that I did not belong. Like Martinez, I eventually outgrew feeling like an outcast after learning and becoming accustomed to the different discourses that I was exposed to, but it took me a lot less time to do this than Martinez did, it seems.
In James Paul Gee’s essay “Discourse, small d, Big D”, he says “Early in life, we all learn a culturally distinctive way of being an “everyday person” as a member of our family and community”( J., Gee ). I picked this out because, while I was exposed to a family discourse like a normal child, I did not have a traditional “community” discourses to be exposed to for most of my childhood. While I was exposed to a homeschooling community for little bit of my life, it did not really affect me as much as the public-school community did. This community discourse did not feel as important to me when I started this project, but after finishing it, I can see how important it is in shaping the way a child develops.
All in all, I would say that the experiences I had, although they were somewhat negative, did help me in my life in the long run. They gave me the experiences that helped me learn how to adapt to future discourses that I would have to learn in my future jobs and in college.
Martinez, M. (n.d.). Tongue of Lead. Retrieved March/April, 2019.
J., Gee. (n.d.). Discouse, small d, Big D. Retrieved February/March, 2019.
“Language Evolves (w/ LeVar Burton).” How to Apply Ethics to Everyday Life? with Ryan Huber, Episode #61 of Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness on Earwolf, www.earwolf.com/episode/language-evolves-w-levar-burton/.
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