Imagine you are interviewed five years from now for your dream job (which likely has nothing to do with Chinese history!); the interviewer sees on your transcript you took “HST124: “Half the Sky” – Women in Chinese History”, and they ask: “Oh, what did you learn in that course?” What is your answer? Why?
Five years from now, I imagine that I will be working somewhere that benefits the world around me, whether it be within the volunteer and nonprofit field, or anthropology and fieldwork field. If the later is what ends up happening, I would be hoping to do fieldwork somewhere near or in China, so in that case, this class would definitely be important to my job. Either way, my answer would be as follows. In this class I have learned so much, not only regarding the content itself, but also regarding my own worth ethic and style. Not only have I learned about the histories and legacies of women in China, but I have also learned about the oppression of women and the tools that were used by women to endure such oppression. We learned about the true history of Mulan, other strong womanly figures like Empress Wu and Lady Hao, as well as types of medicinal practices and script-writing that women did in history. In addition to all of the course content, I also learned a lot about how I work as a student. I would often find myself missing a blog post or an assignment, but would quickly get back on track within a few days. Near the end of the semester, I definitely got better with getting things done on time, and I was much more proud of the work I accomplished as well. There were a few classes where we checked in and focused on things we could do better, and those were extremely beneficial as well. For instance, in one class, we went over how to take beneficial reading notes, which can then be translated into the 5-15 reports. This made it a lot easier to complete the 5-15 reports in a timely manner as well. Overall, I learned a lot during this course.
How has the anthropology perspective in ATH273 helped you see the history of Chinese women in a more complex way? And/Or how has the history course HST123 brought additional depth to the study of contemporary society and practices in ATH 273? In other words: did you earn the IL designation?
As an anthropology major, these two classes were very interesting to me and definitely ones I knew I wanted to take. I was familiar with the ways in which the anthropological perspective tied into course content, so getting to pair it with a historical class was extremely interesting to me. This course definitely earned the IL course tag. It was very cool to be learning about similar topics within each course, while going into depth on different aspects of them within each respective class. For instance, in the HST class, we learned about the history of women’s oppression in China, going through it in a straight timeline way. In ATH, we delved into certain aspects of oppression and the ways in which they were documented within Chinese history, specifically foot binding. It was cool to get to dive deeper into certain ideas and histories that we covered within HST. We also studied more of the religious and ceremonial aspects of Chinese history in Dr. Miller’s class, which was cool to learn in conjunction with the different time periods covered in HST. Overall, it was very interesting to pair these two courses together and definitely beneficial from a student perspective.
Final Portfolio Project Below
Signing Off! ~<3
~Clare <3
