You will be prompted, weekly, for various items to archive. Please refer to the Google Docs document in the e-Portfolio folder in Bb, which will provide tips on how to store and organize these artifacts. By the time this component of your eP is due, you will have a rich repository from which to draw. You will choose the top five artifacts that you believe best represent your learning experience in this course. Each item should contain a representative picture and a summary for why it was selected, including why it is representative of your learning experience.
2)To be completely honest, I was unsure of the best way to answer this question. Since this is our first ePortfolio assignment, I hope you will be patient with me as I try to figure it out! The object I found in my home that I feel represents a main aspect of my culture is this painting. My Abuelita passed it down to me from her mother, an abstract artist from Panama. Her work has been featured in an exhibition called “Perceptive Strokes: Women artists from Panama” in Washington DC.
I am most certainly racially white, but I do feel connected to my hispanic heritage. No one would necessarily look at me and see that, but I think that goes to show that everyone has their own unique story. Family has always been very important. The United States is truly a melting pot of cultures, and my family tree is just one of the millions of examples. In much of her work, my great grandmother also painted primarily females, and given the time she grew up in, I believe it had a lot to do with a sense of femininity as well as her hope for gender equality.
As the years go by, my Abuelita continues to pass down paintings to me and my cousins, with the vast majority of us being female. I only hope we can continue to carry her legacy.
I feel as though this chart is reasonably accurate. The United States’ power distance would be greater than a country like Thailand where the respect for those who are in roles of more responsibility or power is a little greater. To me, this also goes hand-in-hand with individualism, where in the United States’ is more about me and mine, unlike Thailand where they are more worried about the community and the collective good. I was a little confused about the masculinity category before reading more, but I do see how the United States is clearly about what is defined as masculinity in this context, with competition being the primary aspect. In our capitalistic society, of course this is going to be what drives us and our economy. Thailand scored higher on uncertainty avoidance I believe due to their collectivist culture that could make them wary perhaps of outsiders or untraditional behavior. The score for long term orientation was the same as I believe many countries face the problem of being unable to fix their past and how that can have a negative impact on dealing with the problems of the future. Indulgence is what America is perhaps known best for in more ways than one, which is indicated with the large difference in numbers between the two countries.
1) Above is a picture of my parents, me, and my Abuelita from 2017. I also included a picture of a cross to represent something that helped shape my values. I wasn’t raised a traditional Christian. I was not baptized and did not regularly attend church. My parents were dragged to Sunday services when they were children and did not want to put anything upon me. For this reason, I was able to find my connection with God on my own. I know it sounds cheesy, but I truly believe that the best way to show you are a person of good faith is in your actions towards other people. One thing I really love about Christianity is the idea that you should accept other people for who they are and their mistakes, and always have faith that people are willing to change. Throughout history many people claiming to be Christian have not followed this concept, which is frustrating for me and has alienated some people from being Christian.
After completing the activity, I found very few discrepancies between my and my parents values. At different points in my life I would have probably found more, but now at 23 and a little wiser than I was at 16, I realize that I do believe my parents to be wonderful people who want what is best for me, but also the community at large. I believe my dad especially passed down some of his altruism to me. Because I think so highly of my parents, it makes sense I would share their values in most things. Apart from them, my past and current relationships with both significant others and friends (some of whom with not my best interest in mind) have shaped my values and outlook on the world. I would consider myself close with my extended family, but due to their distance from me physically I would say they have not played as large as a role in shaping my values, apart from of course my grandparents who helped shape my parents values and therefore mine as well.
3)
Emotions can be classified into those that encourage independence of the self from others and those that encourage interdependence with others (Kitayama, Markus, & Matsumoto, 1995). Kitayama et al. have defined “socially disengaged emotions” as the emotions that tend to separate or disengage the self from social relationships and promote the perceived independence of the self from those relationships. On the other hand, they have defined “socially engaged emotions” as those that tend to assimilate the self in the relationship and enhance the perceived interdependence of the self with relevant others.
1. Write five happy episodes or situations which you have experienced in the past.
- Going on a school trip to Disney world with my 8th grade class
- Taking myself out to a restaurant by myself for the first time
- Being on the ferry during the fireworks at Harborfest
- My mom’s boozy birthday lunch at a winery in Tuscany with our extended family
- Spending a day with my boyfriend and him meeting my family in the Rocky Mountains
2. Look at your responses again. Which episodes or situations do you think are associated with “socially disengaged emotions”? Which episodes or situations do you think are associated with “socially engaged emotions”? Write the numbers of the episodes.
(a) Socially disengaged emotions: 2 and 3
(b) Socially engaged emotions: 1,4,5
Visual artifact idea: find a representative photo or image which illustrates each of these emotions.
I was a little confused about what to do here so I just included a picture from my second and fifth experience to include both the independent and interdependent emotions for me personally.
I chose the order that I did because of how I related to them personally. Some topics were harder for me to relate to than others, but this was one of the first times I felt like I got to express some of the stuff that makes up who I am culturally and how I can go on to understand others cultures that may be entirely different.