American Dream 2.0 |
The American Dream 2.0 project was one that explored the idea of the "American Dream" and how it has changed from previous decades. This project was inspired by the question do we truly own our American Dream? Are we even able to come close to reaching it? To get real insight on this topic, each student interviewed a person that came of age during the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, or 2000s, and compared their definitions of the American Dream to our current ones. Another one of our big inspirations was Shinpei Takeda's "Inscription." Shinpei is an abstract artist that loves the idea of arrival. As a class, we each wrote stories of when we felt we had a sense of arrival, which were displayed at the New Americans Museum during the night of our exhibition along with Shinpei's "Inscription."
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Writing Process
As a class, we wrote a book on the "American Dream" that included our interview stories along with our personal reflections. Writing our book took many revisions, edits, and peer critiques. Our first step into creating our book was to interview our person of choice and then write a 4 page biographical narrative on our person that included history on the decade that our person came of age in. Our narratives were later then merged into one whole chapter that corresponded with our decade. Since we created a book together as a class, there were many different writing styles. Having to input everyones thoughts and ideas without making the book seem choppy and confusing was one of the biggest struggles throughout the whole writing process. Through this project, I realized that I enjoyed the peer critiques part of the writing process. Even though going through peoples papers for what seemed like the millionth time, I liked seeing the improvements in every draft. I feel like in this project I have learned how to take feed back from others and make corrections based on my writing style, not just "copy and paste" their edits.
Self ReflectionMy biggest take-away from this American Dream 2.0 project was the shift in the way I see my dreams and my future. Through reading everyones interviews and hearing about their experiences, it made me open my eyes to see that life really isn't perfect and dreams don't just "come true." But although this project has made me see that not everything in life is perfect and easy, it has allowed me to be content with the fact that it isn't perfect. Everyone has their own dreams, and everyone can reach those dreams, but it may not always be handed over to you. To make these dreams an actual possibility takes dedication and the courage to try even harder when times get tough.
ExhibitionThe day of our exhibition was a very hectic one, but I enjoyed every minuet of it. Everyone was working together to make sure our cranky light box theater was working and displaying our exhibition in a professional manner. Having exhibition at another location other than school was a very different experience which brought on a higher level of pressure. Since we were working with an artist and using a museum as our exhibition location, I feel as if our team was working towards something bigger than just a school project. I felt like we were doing something to teach others aside from our family and friends, that we were putting our hard work to use. From the interviews, drafts, music bands, cranky scrolls, more drafts, and putting together our exhibition, I couldn't be more proud of this project and team.
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