DISCUSSION 1

1. How has examining your beliefs, assumptions, and values related to your historical and current events impacted how you process information in your daily life? For example, consider claims made by politicians, news headlines, tweets by celebrities, or articles shared by your family on social media.
2. What changes, big or small, have occurred in how you apply historical inquiry skills to classes, your personal life, and/or your career?

Be sure to provide specific examples to support your points.

DISCUSSION 2

 For your response posts to your peers, address the following:

1. What perspectives have your peers offered that you had not previously considered about the value of identifying one's beliefs, assumptions, and values?
2. Suggest other ways historical inquiry skills might help your peers in their personal, professional, and academic careers.

Lynzy post

1.How has examining your beliefs, assumptions, and values related to your historical and current events impacted how you process information in your daily life? 

Examining my beliefs, assumptions and values within this course has helped me process information in my daily life by reassessing what I believe based on the bias or presentation of the information I am being shown. In social media there is a ton of business pages with small captions on their posts with no real link to check their sources. This can be easy to just believe what is being put out, but by reevaluating my thoughts and values I reevaluate what I think the producer wants to say. I can research the topic or discuss it with my friends and hear their views on this. With information from my family I can notice where I got some of my assumptions and perhaps politely suggest we both reexamine that assumption. Examining what my current values are and where they stem from help me understand which ones I would like to reevaluate or research more about. Understanding that everyone else also has assumptions and pre conceived notions is helpful in being able to communicate and see a bias in a topic as well. 

2. What changes, big or small, have occurred in how you apply historical inquiry skills to classes, your personal life, and/or your career?

I have learned a lot this term and I believe that I will be using the technique of finding out who was the silenced or not present perspective in articles or content I am reading in the future. I think this will be make the biggest change in evaluating sources for classes and to further my reexamination of my own assumptions, beliefs, and values. I am getting my degree in graphic design and being able to find the missing perspective will be extremely helpful in making sure my designs reach my desired audience without offense. 

Kylie post

The impact that this class has had on my daily life has been greater than I had expected when I signed up to take it. Examining my own beliefs, assumptions, and values has allowed me to better see the biases I bring to each choice that I make and conversation in which I participate. Not only has this had a broad effect in my life, but in regards to my historical event (the Stonewall Riots) and the current event ("Don't Say Gay" bill) which I studied, I have learned much about the issues surrounding sources about Stonewall and "Don't Say Gay." One example of this is when I see an acquaintance post something biased against members of the LGBTQ community on social media. Rather than simply being angry, I can examine their potential biases and see a bigger picture surrounding the issue. While this understanding doesn't make their bigotry "okay," it does help to calm me down and allow me to think more clearly about my response.

The biggest change that I have seen in my personal life, other than the above, stemmed from the reading of a quote in an early module. It said "practice the historian's craft." I am not sure where this line comes from, but only that it was in a module overview early on in this class. The way that this quote was phrased struck me. Each word seemed so carefully placed. "Practice," meaning that the historian's craft is an ongoing effort, "historian's," implying an innate ownership over this practice when one interacts with and claims it, and "craft," leading me to believe that there is so much more to history than dates and names. This line has made a deep imprint on me. I used to believe that history class was dull and, at its roots, simply about memorizing information. This class has shown me that there is so much more to history, and that one's philosophy surrounding how they "practice the historian's craft" is truly what makes or breaks the love built around such a practice.