Assignment 4C

I found a few definitions all on the same site and I think that if you put them all together you have a pretty good definition of culture as it relates to this class. Culture is defined as a particular society at a particular time and place, for example: "early Mayan civilization". It can also be defined as the tastes in art and manners that are favored by a social group or acculturation (all the knowledge and values shared by a society). This pertains to our class and these projects in particular because we have been looking at different eras of latin america and there society and art.

wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

For assignment 3a I chose Gabriella Tessum’s writing because I liked the way she formatted it and the information was very interesting. I learned more about the Mayan history which was cool for me because I had done them for my assignment. I learned that the Mayans main sources of economy was agriculture and that they grew maize, cotton, beans, squash and cacao. This assignment is just another example of Freire’s theory because we are learning in different ways about our subjects. Also we get to chose our own topic out of a group so we were able to use or own minds and knowledge of the groups to decide what we wanted to learn more about. Gabriellas writing on the Mayans related to our studying of the Pre Columbian era in Latin America.


For assignment 4a I chose to review Melanie Hall’s work because she had a lot of interesting information on Junipero Serra that I had not found in my research. I learned that when the Spanish empire sought to control the indigenous people and use them as a workforce the priest's mission was to bring salvation to as many non-Christians as possible. Father Junipero Serra confirmed 5,309 people who were mostly Indians. As I said before in the last assessment I did of a similar assignment, our ability to chose our own topics to research as long as they pertain to the era we are studying is a good example of Freire’s theory. A student should want to learn about what they are studying and make their own choices when it comes to their education. Also it increases there learning the information when they are interested in their subject and with our assignments it is up to the students to chose what best suites them to learn about.