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Welcome to my class blog!  To navigate through the content, please choose discussion posts or essays on the menu.  What follows is my reflection essay.

It’s amazing what can be accomplished within one semester, without even realizing it.  Looking back at the course outcomes, I can definitely say that I have demonstrated growth in each, and throughout the course of the semester, I have especially had a chance to grow with respect to outcomes one and two.

I came into this class with absolutely no college history class experience, and I leave with a solid background for Chicana/Latina history and feminist theory.  Looking through my discussion posts, I see that I have gotten much better at engaging with the texts we read.  My first few posts, especially from Cartographies of Struggle, are very casual and filled with initial reactions.  While this may have been a good way to get started with these posts, I see that I am now much more comfortable engaging with quotes, or bigger ideas on my own (before class discussion).  This may be best exemplified in my ‘This Bridge Called My Back’ post, where I look at a specific statement from the reading and the implications it has for the author and for minorities in general.

While my discussion posts do not always show my ability to describe Chicana experiences, since they tend to be shorter and filled with initial reactions and thoughts to bring to class, I was truly able to solidify this ability through class discussions and writing the essays.  I enjoyed being able to grapple with themes and issues from the books we read in a more substantial form, so I got much more out of writing the essays, and I think they demonstrate fully my grasp of the first two outcomes.

I was able to pick out larger ideas and conflicts from our readings to discuss in my essays, examining the ways that gender and race affect situations within a given historical context.  I did this a little bit in my Negotiating Conquest essay.  I was able to examine the different situations of women within the missions and to see how they differed depending on their race or class.  I was really able to grapple with historical context and its meaning in my last two essays.  By the end of the semester as I was writing these essays, I found I was quite comfortable discussing and identifying the ways race affected the situations these women found themselves in.

The historiography was my demonstration of the third outcome.  Looking at the third outcome, I believe that I have been able to apply course knowledge to my historiography, because I was able explore the ways in which Chicana organizers were represented.  I did have a difficult time avoiding writing a history, so the process was a lot more difficult than I anticipated.  I do believe I could have done a better job discussing the progression of representation through my sources, and using the contexts for the publications of each source and the goals of the author to make a more compelling exploration and argument.  My paper was a decent on-the-surface look at representation, but I think there is room for growth with this, and more practice with historiographical writing would really improve how I approached the paper.

Overall, I know I leave this class with a solid foundation in feminist theory and Chicana feminist history that I can build on in the future.  Jett’s comment that this class is only the beginning really stuck with me, and I leave knowing that while I am definitely more knowledgeable about this topic, there is still a lot more to learn and explore.