Holiday

My review went about as I expected it would, I was not confident I'd yet stumbled upon the solution I was looking for, and my faculty panel seemed to voice similar sentiments. My most recent explorations are just too tight and rigid to be voicing a progressive spirit. I think I was hoping to create something that felt more 'refined' to differentiate it from other students groups, but ended off too far in one direction.


So what exactly is progressive?

To me, it's a buzzword. It encompasses too many things to be meaningful. I think with my keywords of connectivity and overlap, I was trying to unpack the sense of what progressive means for this group. Progressive has taken on new meanings, when you think of Obama. Hope… Change… they are now inextricably linked to this sense of progress. Some free association that comes to mind:

Open
Forward
Developed
Modern
Reform
Liberal
New
Change
Innovative
Forward-thinking
Enlightened

Franc's comments were rather interesting, he said it seems like I'd run through so many options, that the challenge may not have a good solution, and usually when he's confronted with this kind of situation, he uses a text-only solution. He said that the word 'Roosevelt' itself has certain connotations, it conjures an images and ideals on its own.

I think he's right, but also I feel like it would be a shame to end up on something text based—after all this. More importantly, those connotations are deteriorating. If you're thirty and older or a bit of a history dork (such as myself), Franklin and Eleanor's contributions to the United States are quite apparent, and one might say what we see now with Obama is that history repeating, or being reinvented at least. Yet, the generational gap widens, and those connotations become less obvious.

I've been trying to take these past few days away from my project, to digest the comments I was given and give myself some room before I start to work again. I imagine that over the course of break I'll have one of the more active blogs, but the posting will be a little more brief with more images.

I'm in process of creating a sort of curriculum for break, as well as a timeline.