Creative & Critical Thinking

In my time at UW Bothell, I have worked on a variety of assignments that tested my creativity and allowed me to go outside of my comfort zone and show everyone how I am able to use a vast of different perspectives in my work through analysis, application, interpretation and other skills that symbolize some of my main goals in the IAS program when it comes to critical and creative thinking. Being a Community Psychology Major, I am expected to have a clear understanding on what it means to have a key eye for detail, which comes with the one of the IAS objectives of being a critical/creative thinker and working to make the best statements in my academic work possible, which I have shown throughout my academic career. But out of all of the academic pieces that I have done, there are two particular artifacts of mine that I feel represent my abilities as a creative and critical thinker in academics. The first artifact was the final paper that I wrote in my Social Psychology class, in which I wrote a final paper based on the movie American History X, and did an analysis on its critical themes of prejudice that are displayed throughout the film. The second artifact was in my Gender and Sexuality Studies class, in which I did an analysis of the LGBT community and its culture in New York City based upon the various films that we watched in class and how it was representative of LGBT values back in the 90’s.

For my BIS 225 Social Psychology course, taught by Professor Carrie Lanza, I was required to chose one Hollywood film that related the study of social interactions and how individuals are affected based on what type of interaction they have with each other; then proceed to write a paper on what core themes found in the film affect how people intermingle with one another. For my American History X Paper, I proceeded to do an analysis of the movie in question and dive into the key themes that are based upon the various inequalities seen among the White majority race and the other minority races seen throughout the film. Throughout my work, I directly focus upon the major themes of racism, discrimination and stereotyping that are developed and explored in American History X and how it parallels with real life examples and incidents. I also go into further discussion about the characters in the movie, and how while some of them continue to cling onto their misguided beliefs, like the villainous character of Cameron Alexander, others proceed to develop and grow as people, eventually coming to understand how that kind of hatred is perpetrated by others and what they can do to break free from that cycle of hate, like the protagonist Derek Vinyard.

I found this artifact as being significant to my academic portfolio since it embodies my own critical thinking on being able to watch a movie and having the capacity to analyze its key themes in regards to difficult subjects such as racism and write about how they are important to the movie’s main message. This artifact also exemplifies my creativity by displaying a core concentration on some of the examples of scenes from the film that hammer home the injustices that are similar to what happens in reality and blurs the line between that and fiction, one example being when I talked about a scene in which a group of skinheads assault a Korean storeowner and his workers out of misguided belief that they stole those jobs from white people. Furthermore, I am able use my critical thinking skills in a way that allows my to talk about media that explored various systems of prejudice, such as sexism, homophobia and especially racism.

In my BIS 221 Gender and Sexuality class, taught by Professor Tagle, one of my final assignments for the class was when I had to type up a final paper that required me to do a case study on the prominence of LGBT culture in New York City, chronicle its true origins that date back to the 90s and how these cultural values continue to remain noticeable even today. Throughout my writing, I am able to analyze and explore key themes that are talked about in the films films Paris Is Burning and Kiki, which dive into detail in regards to the melting pot of LGBT racial minorities and how their neighborhoods of Christopher Street Piers and West Village played a critical role in their quest for equal rights. I also talk about and bring direct focus on how these communities fought to save their homes from the plague of gentrification and ongoing increase of drugs and violent crime. Furthermore, I am able to use my abilities in interpretation and application to argue on how all queer identities and motilities are similar and differing from one another various ways and not completely universal to how people should analyze race, class, gender and sexuality.

What makes this artifact so significant to my portfolio is that it its an example of my critical thinking abilities considering a group of people that I want to focus on for my future career based on Community Psychology. It is also necessary because it focuses upon the IAS objective of critical thinking, which required me to focus upon a specific topic, (LGBT groups) and write a clear argument on how this community is significant in NYC’s culture. Also, I am able to get creative and use various films that we watched in class to intersect their themes with one another so I can argue for a group that is highly undervalued in the world that we live in today.

With one of IAS’s core values being about creativity and critical thinking, which requires students like me to bring about new ideas and values as an example of how we grow as students from the assumptions we make, I personally believe that I have exemplified what it means to be a person that is not just able to deviate from the standard norm of ideas, but also be able to have different perspectives on information that is already out there. Whether its being creative and exploring the themes of a film that I have never given much thought about in the past like American History X, or being able to critically reflect upon on a culture that was explored in an earlier period of time like the LGBT community of NYC in the 90’s, I feel that these two artifacts in question demonstrate how I have come a long way as a imaginative thinker with plenty of innovative ideas. As I get closer to approaching life after college, I hope that these abilities of creative and critical thinking that I have shown will be of great use to me for my major in Community Psychology, as that’s the kind of mindset I will need in the near future.