Brizendine_McMichaelChs2and3-1exn1la.
The attached document is one of the first reading responses that I ever wrote for my Introduction to International Development Studies class. As this class functions as my first real academic introduction to what I plan to specialize in within my International Studies degree, this paper would be significant to me simply for that reason alone. However, it also covers material that brought me new understanding not only about the field in which I’m so interested, but the state of the world we live in. The reading to which this paper responds is about the deep, long-lasting impact that colonialism/imperialism, as well as the later attempts to address the issues caused by these things in the form of the Development Project, had on the developing world. In composing this piece, I had to understand the provided excerpt, and in so doing I had to shift the way in which I viewed the significance of legacy. The text explained so many things about which I’d wondered for so long, and granted me not only an explanation but also an altered perspective.
However, the significance of this reading response isn’t only in the material it covered. This was also one of the first assignments I’d received with little to no guidelines on how to approach it. As a class, we were told merely that our response had to analyze, rather than summarize, the piece about which we were to write. As someone who greatly appreciates detailed parameters for anything I have to undertake, I was incredibly stressed out by this for quite some time. Finally, however, I decided to trust my gut not only about what comprises an analysis, but also about what I supposed my professor intended that we analyze (the reading was quite dense, and covered a lot of material). To my great surprise, I received one of the highest scores in the class on this assignment; this, of course, has dramatically increased my confidence in both my intuition and my overall writing ability as it pertains to producing valid and relevant content, even without the detailed instructions I had always thought I so needed. From this assignment I learned not only about the unfortunate foundations of a topic about which I’ve been deeply interested for so long, but also that I can trust myself when it comes to ambiguity in instruction. For each of these reasons alone I would have thought this reading response worthy of being an artifact, but it’s because of the combination of the two that I’m confident I chose correctly.