First Post About Readings

There was a comment that I wanted to make about the video from last week so I'll start with that. I enjoyed the video that we watched in class last week. It would be such an experience to be a part of something like that. Although I must say after watching the video I feel like as white person I would feel bad about myself after every class. I'm sure the same can be said for all the students of various backgrouds. But for some reason after watching the video I felt like a lot of the sessions where an attack on the white students. I guess it's just hard to not personalize things when it comes to race, especially if you're the one being attacked. It's like one of the incidents with one of the white students where another student was commenting that he was the enemy. I just feel like it came down to Whites against everyone else and that issues between other races and cultures didn't seem to be addressed as much.

I enjoyed this weeks readings and am finding the Creating Inclusive Campus Environment book to be a very easy read. A couple of things really stood out to me in Chapter 7. It talked about how when you come to college it's important to get involved and how you need to join student groups right away. I feel like, while this a great idea and theory, it's hard for students to reach out on their own. I know when I went through freshman orientation the last thing I wanted to do was go to another activity fair and approach even more new people and step outside of my comfort zone. After reading the chapter I never thought about how hard it might be for students who are part of underrepresented populations because not only are they dealing with the insecurities that all freshman might face they might also have to struggle with not even having a group to identify with. I also like that the chapter listed actual strategies that could be effective in reaching out to underrepresented students.

I liked that Chapter 8 addressed the issue of MACCs and SAOs working together. I'd be interested to see or hear how well the two offices work together on our campus. I also thought it was an interesting and valid point about the MACC needing to be careful to make it's own identity and show that it needs to stand alone and not get sucked into being a part of the SAO.