Driving Question: How can I address some of the present threats to global health while promoting human rights and social progress?

Project Overview: In this module, students were introduced to the foundations of global health. They learned about basic concepts, measurements, and determinants of health, and a number of key perspectives for considering global health issues.

For her project, Estelle explored water scarcity in Honduras, which leads to a lack of basic sanitation and clean water for up to 1.8 million people. Non-communicable diseases in Honduras attributed to water cause a DALY rate of 4,540 per 100,000 people. Disease spreads through contaminated food and water tanks, and poor management, climate change, and political unrest worsen the issue.

Project Reflection: “Exploring the niche of environmental global health opened my mind to so many new areas of interest in this field.  I thoroughly enjoyed this module and felt like the skills will be very applicable to other modules.”

Driving Question: How can I become proficient in Australian slang through art?

Class of 2021 student Gigi E. designed her project on Australian slang and how it has become a part of the country’s identity. Her goal was to become competent and confident in communicating slang with the local community. She demonstrated this by creating a mini dictionary documenting Australian slang terms she learned through interactions with the locals. 

“To further my understanding of Australian Slang, I thought there was no better source than the people of Australia themselves. Today I went around Scape and talked to people about their favorite Australian slang words. It was interesting to see how many of the terms that I already knew. Just from my experiences with Lexie and Elyce, I was able to learn a lot more terms than I thought I did. 

The first people I interviewed were the people at the reception at Scape. They were able to confirm a bunch of the other terms that I had in my initial entries. This helped me know that they are still relevant and used today. One new word that they told me (which is now one of my favorite terms) is Eshay, a wannabe teenage gangster. They were able to show us pictures of what they meant and it was quite funny to walk around the city and recognize them on the streets.”

Driving Question: How can I incorporate more local and homemade food into my diet to improve my sustainability and health?

Project Description:

My project is a short book of recipes I have written myself that use local, sustainable, and healthy ingredients. To write these recipes, I looked at foods I eat most often and local foods I have access to decide on the items before researching the history of each item and the different methods used to make them so I could create my own recipes. I also researched how a recipe is written, how to cater to your intended audience, the proper language to use, and the elements to include. My final product is a collection of these recipes that could be used by relatively new cooks.

Reflection:

“This project was especially interesting because I have done a lot of cooking and baking in my life, but I have never been one to follow recipes. Doing this project and creating my own recipes really helped me understand how recipes can be useful as well as how much work and effort goes into making each one. I think I will now be at least slightly more inclined to follow recipes when cooking in the future.”

Driving Question: How can I contribute to solving a problem in my local community?

Project Description:

The project aims to spread awareness on the importance of education to the underprivileged and the existing educational opportunities. I will be directing a documentary that spreads the message of the project’s aim. This solutions fills the gap off the unawareness on the importance of education and the opportunity available to their children.

Reflection:

“I am really excited to work on directing my documentary once the schools of Tamilnadu opens. TGS was an incredible educational opportunity for me and I want to give back to my community by connecting children to existing educational opportunities in India.”

Driving Question: How can we think critically to effectively inform citizens in a media manipulated world?

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

My goal for this module was to develop my critical thinking skills and learn to make meaningful social messages. I achieved it in my summative video.

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

I learnt to deliver social messages effectively by using sarcasm as a tool.

Driving Question: What are the unique properties of a meal/dish from my culture and how can I share that with the world?

Project Description: This module was about exploring my culture and highlighting our unique characteristics. They could be from language or family to religion and traditions. I was looking for a dish that is important to me and represents a big part of my culture. My final product for the project is a video explaining the importance of my dish, pan de muerto, and how to do it step by step.

Project Reflection: “I enjoyed learned about my culture and the origin of many of my traditions. Baking pan de muerto and recording the process was challenging and exciting at the same time. I learned how to communicate in a simple and interesting way.” -Marily

Driving Question: How can I address some of the present threats to global health while promoting human rights and social progress?

Project Description: My project is a policy brief about the Malaria situation in Congo. It includes its nature and magnitude, the most affected populations, the socio-economic consequences, and the potential solution to reduce the burden. The policy aims to convince the finance Minister of Congo to invest in solutions for Malaria.

Project Reflection: “I enjoyed hearing from my peers how the health care systems function in different countries. A challenge was writing in the concise and precise way required for the policy brief.” -Sofia W.

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

Initially, my plan for this module was to produce both a song and an accompanying animation. The first thing that shattered this initial goal is the fact that I cannot sing. There is no way around it. Secondly, my laptop was not powerful enough for animations. My goal then morphed into being able to produce “paintings” on a digital medium at the standard I usually do with physical paint and a canvas.

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

For one, I never thought I would ever make art from a laptop. Often when I am using my laptop, if I am not on Youtube or Reddit, I am definitely tinkering on a program or programming one thing or the other. As such, I have always labeled my laptop as a tool for me to express only the more “analytical” tenet of my creativity that solely produces output like programs, algorithms, and 3D designs. As such, I have only ever expressed the equally potent “visual” tennet of my creativity in my extensive painting and drawing. I never thought of using a laptop to produce art of the same standard I do with physical paintings. Not only that, but I never thought that painting on my laptop could put me in the transcendental flow state that physical painting always does for me. Boy, was I wrong!

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

In this module, I wanted to delve into the old East Asian Buddhist tradition of using art as a form of meditation, freeing the mind of its rational constraints and leading to samadhi or meditative awareness. I did this by both developing skills in calligraphy itself as well as attempting a form of meditation while practicing those skills and making the pieces above. The result, I hope, is some appearance of spontaneity and creativity, the two terms that anyone would use to describe the works of calligraphy that Buddhist monks in China, Japan, and Korea made while immersed in their happy, cheerful meditation.

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

The most interesting thing that I learned while painting the Chinese characters was how challenging it is to attain any sort of balance or beauty with them. A simple downward brushstroke takes many months or perhaps years of practice to look even half-decent to a person who knows calligraphy. I did not get to this stage over the course of the project; what I did do was get a very brief look into the complexity of this medium – how the characters that you paint with the brush are not so much those that you paint but those that are left behind by the brush itself. Any stroke, whether it be a horizontal line or a dot, can very candidly suggest the calligrapher’s state of mind when painting it, meaning that any frustration or hesitance is immediately visible in the forms of the characters. This is perhaps the harshest aspect of calligraphy – each stroke is permanent and irrevocable, and cannot be embellished afterward. Not only does each brushstroke reveal your skill with the ink, but it will also reveal your ability to leave distracting thoughts behind and pool all of your mental energies into a single movement of the hand.

Poem Translation

The pieces above are renditions, in various styles of calligraphy, of three poems that I composed in a kind of bad Classical Chinese; the English translations are here:

Regular Style Poem

In the snore of my dog and the sound of my
Mother cooking dinner,
I hear Buddha’s joyful laugh;
Just as there are many drops of water but only one
Pond,
So are there many Buddhas but only one
Dharma.

Semi-Cursive Poem

Alone I walk to the pond,
Looking for solitary ducks to feed with my
Brown paper bag.

Cursive Poem

The perpetual sound of hail on the window –
Instead of my friends’ happy chatter,
Every day I hear only this.

Driving Question: How might I grow my creativity during the COVID-19 crisis through exploring the science of creativity and innovation and experimenting with art?

What were your goals for this module? How did you achieve them?

For this module, my intention was to have fun with painting and expand my skills by painting something I like: Frogs. I am really fascinated with poisonous frogs, not only because of how beautiful they are but also because of the interesting way they repel predators. I found these types of frogs have an effective metaphor for the current pandemic we are experiencing and chose to showcase that analogy through this project.

What did you learn about yourself or about your creative process or about your medium?

I discovered a new passion for painting: I have always been interested in the medium but not had enough creative confidence to try it out. Being able to work on my painting skills through a project with so much creative freedom was a great way for me to discover and enhance my own skills.