While I believe that most of these points apply to our CODES journey, I think that the most important one is the first, which is to join the community. This almost embodies all the work we’ve done until now, with us forming a way to get involved with the communities in and around Alton. This is especially true in the most recent semester of CODES classes, with us doing weekly site visits to the middle school. This is a more forward way that we have used the first point, however, I think that there’s another aspect to this that I haven’t thought about until now, which is the way that we shared community members’ stories. After creating a compilation of the digital stories we had been working on, we put it in a local art showing at Jacoby Arts Center. I had never even considered the fact that the way we showed our product was through the community. I’m sure that if I thought about it more, I could find tons of examples of the first point throughout our prior curriculum.
Thinking more recently, if I had to choose a point that applies to our most recent work, it would be the fifth point, which is to tell better stories. My current work in class is to review and improve on the work we did last semester at the middle school, which, by itself is an example of hoping to tell better stories. Thinking in a broader sense, that seems to be a goal for the entire project. Almost all of our products involve supporting newer CODES scholars in telling other community members’ stories.