Entry for week of September 16

    What stood out most to me this week is looking into the Codex Mendoza. Being able to look at the picture and interpret it ourselves without any former information on it was very telling in how different people can interpret things. Within our learning communities it caught my attention how critical thinking can be key for not falling into believing false information. As we said in class, all people have different interpretations of what they see, that is why it is important to look at the main object ourselves so we can make our own conclusions without the bias or misinterpretation of others. This idea also applies to the movie that we watched for class. It portrayed Columbus and the Europeans as heroes and victims throughout the whole movie. People who see that with no context about the indigenous peoples are obviously going to think that the Natives were the villains of this story when in reality, it was actually the Europeans that came in and started trouble. We need to be skeptical with what we see and hear because everybody has different thoughts based on whose point of view they are looking at. 

Comments

  1. Lexie HartnagleSeptember 17, 2021 at 10:34 AM

    Looking at the images of the Codex Mendoza was something that I also found very interesting. Your point about seeing how differently people can interpret an image when they have no prior background information on the object is very true. Even different people in our class who have been studying the same thing for the past three weeks came up with different interpretations. I really enjoyed how the learning communities let us here all the different thoughts we had on just one central idea. I am really looking forward to the other activities we do in the learning communities.

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  2. Professor StarkSeptember 21, 2021 at 2:33 PM

    Thank you, Olivia, for the post. I liked the point made about how there are different ways of interpreting objects and images. The example of the Codex Mendoza was good but what I liked was how you linked this to the film about Columbus and the perception that the indigenous were villains and not victims of Spanish actions. This was a good example of using your critical thinking skills.

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