FIRST literacy experience - Essay Example

The semester has been taken as the most tenable timeframe for observing a literacy experience since it is the most minimal testable and evaluable unit of time. At first, my literacy experience in college was premised upon paying critical attention, as a way of getting meaning out of the scholarly texts I engaged with and lectures and discussions I attended. I had rightly surmised that this was the best way of comprehending the concepts that had been taught and those that had been scheduled for the semester’s outline.

As a matter of fact, understanding these course concepts were of great importance since that was the essence of education and a sure way of excelling in college exams. In a closely related wavelength, I would get out of my way to engage past end-of-semester exams to have a gist of the manner in which exams were set. This learning strategy saw me through most of the assignments and continuous assessment exams. However, with the accentuation of time within the first semester, I came to the realization that I was not engaging the best approach and attitude to my scholarly journey in college.

This is especially after I had an encounter with critical and creative thinking. I realized that like many, I had mistakenly relegated critical and creative thinking and its facets to humanities and cognitive sciences. Because of my encounter with critical thinking I came to realize that learning is a complex whole which comprises critical attention, critical thinking and active participation, commonly known as the reader-response criticism. It is from this point that I came to realize the importance of translating texts into conceptual terms of cultural, metaphysical and psychological realities, over the traditional interpretative approach.

In respect to the foregoing, I embraced and began to adopt the psychoanalytic approach as a way of carrying out intellectual and academic engagements. In the psychoanalytic approach, all literary experiences are defined, qualified and appraised in relation to psychological processes such as projection, introjections, defense mechanisms and identification. Nevertheless, I realized that the method described herein requires more and wider reading exercises so as to have a strong grasp on the concept being taught.

It is from this point that of great understanding that I as any other individual following this path was able to: unconsciously develop a love for the discipline I was dabbling in; form impromptu questions in my mind, note them down for further investigation and consultation with my lecturers; challenge some of the theories, schools of thought or standpoints that had been passed on in lecture halls as plausible explanations to a phenomenon [it is in wide reading and understanding that limitations and strengths in some of the schools of thoughts can be noted]; appreciate discussion forums; and strongly appreciate the importance of maintaining a reading and inquisitive culture, in lieu of reading for exams.

The crux of the observation above is emphasized by Hellenga’s observation to the effect that while the traditional method allows people [like myself at first instance] to comprehend and internalize the concepts being newly introduced, the psychoanalytic approach enabled to internalize, synthesize and even proceed to challenge or recommend these newly taught concepts. In this regard, I came to learn that proper education or