Katelynn Dreeze - Reflection # 2

This semester, AMC 498 has been a light of salvation for me in a semester otherwise filled with disappointing or extremely difficult courses in the School of Information. I am beyond thrilled that I chose this particular course for my cognate requirement for the School of Information’s Master’s degree. I genuinely looked forward to this class every week and I enjoyed working with both Taylor and Shirley during this semester as well. While the workload for this class seemed daunting at first, creating and developing Juana Gonzales’s oral history and online collection has been one of the most rewarding experiences I have had.

In previous courses I have taken at the School of Information, I have developed different types of archival collections. For my Web Archiving class, I, along with my group members, created a web archive of Michigan Folktales. While developing this web archive was interesting and I learned a lot about the methodologies of creating an archive, it was nowhere near the level of detail that I learned while creating and developing Juana’s oral history and collection. When developing the Michigan Folktales web archive, my group and I used web spiders to crawl a list of websites that we had found and appraised as relevant enough to be included in our archive. When creating Juana’s collection, I felt that I was more intimately involved with developing her collection because I was actually generating a majority of her collection as opposed to just searching through a collection. Needless to say, creating a collection is a lot more difficult than sending web spiders out to crawl a collection and gather all the parts that you want.

During AMC 498, I learned just how tedious the nature of developing an online archival collection and oral history is. I learned that one cannot just jump into developing a collection and expect to know all the materials they are collecting. Instead, it takes prior research and knowledge to discern what materials are relevant to include in a collection. I also learned both the awesomeness of having almost complete control over what is included in a collection, and the anxiety that this control can cause. When developing our collection, it was awesome to know that this was our archive and to be able to control what goes into it and what does not. At the same time though, this control personally gave me anxiety because I hoped that what my group and I made represented Juana’s life in an accurate manner and reflected the mission and scope of the Chicana por mi Raza website.

During my time at University of Michigan’s School of Information, I have learned all about the benefits and pitfalls of group projects and working in “real world” situations. I even successfully survived one of the School of Information’s foundation courses, SI 501: Contextual Inquiry and Project Management, where I worked in a group for the entire semester in order to assist a “real world” client with a “real world” problem they were experiencing in their work place. This semester, AMC 498 did teach me a little bit more about the complexities of working in a group and working in a “real world” situation. As previously mentioned, I enjoyed working with Taylor and Shirley. But, these two were not my initial partners for this assignment. They were not even my second or third set of partners. AMC 498 taught me how to be more flexible and accommodating when it comes to working in a group that I did not get to choose nor did I have any control over. I admit that I was a little frustrated when my group for the practicum assignment appeared to change every other day. But, I realized that I had to be adaptable during this situation and accept my group regardless of the situation.

AMC 498 also taught me how to work in a “real world” situation on a more personal level. In SI 501, my group’s client was the Ann Arbor Rotary Club. I learned how to deal with the club’s “real world” problem on a professional level because the problem the club was experiencing was situated in a professional context. I learned how to interact with our client in a professional manner that included formal memos, formal meetings, and planned in-depth interviews. In AMC 498, I learned how to work in a “real world” situation on a more personal level because obviously Juana Gonzales’s collection is very personal to her. I learned how this “real world” situation was much more intimate and involved us using discretion because this was personal experience not only for Juana, but for all of us involved. We wanted to develop a professional collection, but from a very personal source. I gained a deeper understanding of what it is like to create something professional from a personal source and this insight contributed to my desire to produce a collection that accurately reflects Juana’s life and her experiences.

I think that the most important aspect that I learned about Chicana feminism in AMC 498 is how Juana defined Chicana feminism in her oral history. Juana states in her interview that, “Chicana feminism is to be yourself.” Juana’s definition resonates with me because even though it is such a simple phrase, it says so much. I love how this definition says so much about Juana and her personality and beliefs. I also love how this definition is something I can take away from this class, reflect on, act on, and easily remember for the rest of my life.

 I think that the most important thing that I learned about myself from this class is how I can better relate to and understand my mom and her experiences growing up as a migrant worker and the discrimination she faced for being a young Hispanic woman. One story that Juana told in her oral history that brought upon this realization was when Juana discussed how she would hide eating a tortilla at lunch because she did not want people to look down on her for eating Mexican food. I remember my mom telling me a similar story about how she was embarrassed to eat Mexican food during lunch and how much she yearned to just eat a bologna sandwich like the other kids. I feel like now, as a result of taking this course, I can better understand why my mom felt this way. I can understand why she was so embarrassed, and why she wanted so much to have a bologna sandwich and to fit in in a world where she was different.