Assignment 4c Response to Katie Swang

1. Who is your classmate, what is the component category, what is the name of the choice?

I chose to concentrate on Katie Swang’s assignment 3a blog. Her (and my) topics that were the same were World Cities: San Francisco and Los Angeles.

2. What is something similar this classmate said about the choice?

One of the things that was similar between our choices is that we focused on how the history of the two cities has shaped what the cities are like now. We also both discussed how the two cities are centers of tourism and of culture.

3. What is something different this classmate said about the choice?

I think we didn’t so much have different opinion as we did have different perspectives. Katie’s perspective focused more on the art and culture and fashion of the two cities whereas mine felt more linear and fact driven. It was interesting to see how the two of us had similar things to say, but different ways to express them.

4. How would you relate this to Freire's ideas regarding dialogue? For example, you went in thinking one idea, your classmate had a different idea. What new idea emerged from this process?

This relates to Freire’s ideas regarding dialogue because we learned, not from being talked at, but we worked our brains around the puzzle together. The neat thing is that we didn’t really come to different conclusions, but rather, we explored the questions differently. It helped to remind me to “think outside the box.” It reminded me of something that I watched on PBS about the plasticity of the human brain. The concept of the plastic brain is that different neurons get fired and we have to continue to think about things in a different way so that we can fire different neurons and deveolp different parts of our brains. I tend to be very linear and Katie seemed to have a more artistic way of approaching the topic, so it seems that we can each learn to think in different ways from one another.