320. Annexation of College of Creative Studies Course with Dr. Caroline Allen: Telling Life Stories

Telling Life Stories Syllabus from Dr. Caroline Allen. College of Creative Studies, UC Santa Barbara.
Overview of the course. Vic's response to the course on the first day. PDF file of the above sheet: http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/3.responsetoclassonfirstday.pdf.
An Internal Turning Point in My Life. Page 1.
An Internal Turning Point in My Life. Page 2.
An Internal Turning Point in My Life. Page 3.

PDF file of the short story:

http://stokastika2.googlepages.com/7.internalturningpointlifesluggishbu.pdf.

It is essential in my life. Prompt journal writing is "me time." The premise of this course is fundamentally simple. You are in a class with 12-15 other brilliant writers (most of younger age than I am) and you have 12 minutes to write a prompt on a certain topic. You share what you wrote to the class and the class responds in terms of (1) what intrigued you about the story (2) what more do you want to here. The structure of the course is brilliant because with writing, and with many other projects, "the hardest part is always starting, but once you're going you keep on rolling." The starting part is most difficult, and it urges one and several people to finish stuff. Every single student in the class is such a wealth of ideas! The other amazing policy of the class is to be (1) hands off psychologists (2) keep the stories inside the class. People are telling VERY personal stories and it's very important not to impose your views on them in terms of what is right or wrong or what to do with your life. There are some very clever students in the course, for such a young age! And it makes complete sense why they are CCS literature majors.

For example, today, there is an African-American girl who wrote with an amazing voice--snarky, non-chalant. She cares, but she doesn't care. And it was all with an attitude. Saying things that you don't really expect one to say. There are some beautiful phrases and terms emerging from these students' mouthes. At first I was like, great, I am surrounded by a bunch of young people. What do they have to say for themselves? And my gosh. They have so much to say, and they have little jewels here and there I can most certainly learn from. This class gives me hope for he next generation of Millenials. Contrary to the media and research' portrayal of the opposite: a generation of deterioration and decay of society.

Films of the Human and Natural Environment: Syllabus and Reader

Here is a miniature photoessay documenting the upcoming topics to be discussed in the course of Films of the Human and Natural Environment.

Syllabus for My First Course in Marine Conservation with Dr. Ben Halpern, Blue Horizons, Summer 2007

It's kind of ironic. I am 26 years old. Technically I am "1" year old (considering that female species don't mature till age 25 and male species don't mature till age 50). Okay, so my dad is 11 years old, I believe. My sister is -1. My mother is by far the oldest. Perhaps around 25 years of age. But okay, given my existence of 26 earth revolutions around the sun, you would think that I would have taken some form of official "conservation" course. But the truth of the matter is I hadn't, until Ben Halpern's course this summer. Overall it was a great course. It made me think about things I want to think about, like invention and implementation of creative "adaptive management" bureaucracies for effectively solving management problems. But unfortunately, we received few lectures on such things, and the beginning of the class focused more on the typical "depress me" with doom-and-gloom components of "the world is going to hxll," and more particularly our oceans.... Ben is very to the point and gets to the meat of issues. He made us bring in ocean news articles, and we had brief discussions on such issues in the beginning of class. Not only that, Ben made us write a news article off of a scientific article, in which Paul Dayton of Scripps was one of the co-authors! Paul Dayton is one of my all-time heroes, and his lecture at UCLA in 2004 "The Loss of Nature and the Nature of Loss" was one of the "last straws" that made me go on leave of absence to write my philosophy of ecology book, Question Reality. I wanted to interview Paul Dayton for the science article, but there was not enough time. Plus the paper was actually 3 or 4 years old. "Old news," basically. I am thankful Ben made us write the paper, though I wished he had a formal lecture on how to go about systematically writing a science journal article, something he did not do. I know that many people in the class did not even know how to write a scientific article, let alone translate a scientific article in lay terms for the public. I think several students in the class were in great disadvantage. In addition, I added a level of critique in my journal article, mainly because of my one year of writing critiques of scientific papers for the UCLA Ecology and Evolution Department. The second big project Ben had us to do was a presentation on a hot topic in conservation... how scientific findings are being specifically applied to a suite of conservation and management issues. This allowed me to pull out some old demons in my two year mental rabbit hole: I revisited my experience at a conference in Tijuana addressing the threats of rapid development along the coast of Baja California, primarily from Ensenada to the United States border. I wished I could have done a better job in my presentation, though several people thought that what I did in class was quite thorough.

Though many people thought this conservation class would be review for me, it ended up not being so. It was close to "right where I left off" in terms of my own personal knowledge regimes of what I know and what I don't know of the world.

The marine conservation class on its own was very good, but in the context of the budding Blue Horizons Film Program, the class was a bit inappropriate. The primary goal of Blue Horizons is to create a film on a regional environmental issue, and it would be more important to transform Ben's class into a more guest-lecture seminar, inviting local representatives from several agencies to give talks about the issues they work with. In addition, local field trips should have been arranged such that we could become visually oriented to such regional issues. I honestly thought the course was going to be a spitting image of Dr. Miriam Polne-Fuller's epic, life-changing Shoreline Preservation Course that I took as an undergrad TWICE (yep, it's THAT good). If the course were structured as above, and students would have had direct access to the people and places that would be potentially filmed, I bet most of the students would have started their projects a LOT earlier... than instead of cramming within the last couple of weeks. I admit I crammed in terms of editing the film, but I started my project rather early, and racked up 25 hours of film by the time the course was close to being over!