SYE 4406 - Inventing the Self and the Future

Hours: 3
The world we experience is the product of our individual perceptions. We invent this world through our emerging sense of self. This development is not created in isolation; rather we incorporate influences of family, gender roles, ethnic heritage, personal surroundings, and culture. We accept and react to those influences; we frame personal myths and rituals; we shape our strengths and dreams; and from these, we devise our self-driven perceptions, our worlds, forming narratives of our individual pasts and our futures. Discovering the individual worlds we have created, the individual selves we have invented and will invent, largely through personal narratives which will serve as a means of tracing the development of the selves we inhabit and projecting the selves we will create into the future. As part of this process, through a service-learning experience, we will take a group of senior citizens through a similar set of brief narratives through which they will also examine their personal narratives. Writing a series of life stories, memoirs/personal essays, all from a series of brief personal reflections, some of which will be written in class, and a final essay aimed at projecting our individual pasts and our learning at Otterbein into our futures. Self-reflection and insight gained from these explorations will help us to understand our individual places in the Postmodern, Post-9/11 world where truth is not found, but made.

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SYE 4406 - Inventing the Self and the Future