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Showing posts from November, 2019

Power of Books: Liberation Library

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Liberation Library, Logo , 2019 Liberation Library is a non-profit organization that takes book donations and sends them out to incarcerated youth. They do this because providing books to youth in prison helps encourage imagination, self-determination and connection to the outside world. Liberation Library also believes that books help empower the youth to change the criminal justice system. I went to Liberation Library because I wanted to find a way to further obtain service hours, and Liberation Library was an enjoyable and interesting option. Liberation Library relies on volunteers to pack and organize book requests from multiple juvenile detention centers across the state. Volunteers fulfill order forms that the youth fill out regarding their favorite books and authors. If they cannot find a book by one of the authors listed, they find a similar book. The volunteer also writes the kid's name on the inside cover and top of the book, and write out a little note and make a

Walls Closing In

This third unit of our Humanities class this term, Rhetoric, was all about investigating the ways rhetoric can work to motivate people to be engaged. The same appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos from our last unit can be used to analyze many forms of art, not just written texts. We went on a Field Experience to Marquette Park to visit the Living Memorial to Martin Luther King and the Chicago Freedom Movement, a piece of public art erected in recognition of the anti-segregation march held there in 1966. While we were there, we met Sadia Nawab, the Director of Arts and Culture at non-profit community organization Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN). She was one of the primary drivers behind the creation and installation of the project. We also explored how artists use their work as a platform to send political messages, and how Cuban art fed Africa's liberation struggles. For this Action Project, we had to look at an important social topic in today's society and make an art

VBike: Bike Design Concept

For this second unit of Design and Engineering, we learned about how engineers design bikes. We went on several Field Experiences to different bike shops and had designers come in to talk to us about the design of bikes and how that whole process works. At Earth Rider and Working Bikes, we learned about how bikes are made and repaired, and also went out and rode a brand-new type of bike called e-bikes that use electricity to help you pedal. For this Action Project, Better Bikes, as part of a team we brainstormed and developed a custom bike design to best meet the needs of a specific user. The persona that my team was assigned for this project was Vanessa. She has a younger sibling that she needs to take to daycare every morning, and they need to also deal with potholes and loud cars and trains around them. She also has to work around there not being any space inside her home, so she have to lock her bike up outside instead of bringing it inside. Our new bike design is needed becaus