Portland State Universitie's Definition: "Students will enhance their appreciation for and understanding of the rich complexity of the human experience through the study of differences in ethnic and cultural perspectives, class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and ability"
Outside of senior inquiry, I was a very oblivious person. Being that my skin is white I had never experienced racisim, let alone had any serious interaction with discrimination. I believe that the goal of the Diversity of the Human Experience, especially towards students about to enter into the real world, is to open the eyes of students and to make them more aware of what is happening around them socially. Depending on race, gender, the clothing you wear, the words you speak, each and every human will have a very diverse experience of life. While many lives can be compared to as similar, two lives and experiences are never quite the same. Disregarding things happening in the real world, the goal of this target was to also have us as readers become more alert or aware of what events may be taking place in a book. Such as in The Heart of Darkness the extreme amounts of racist remarks that would appear throughout the story.
One assignment that I believe satisfies this PSU goal is my personal conext narrative. My PCN talks about my life experiences and hardships that majority of my peers would not be able to depict from the surface of my personality. As a high school student I've discovered that my levels of anxiousness and depression are beyond what would be considered normal occurences/feelings. I wrote my PCN on my struggle to maintain friendships with my peers due to the fact that my biggest concern was to avoid the sickening feeling of worry or sadness in the morning. This satisfies the PSU goal because as I stated previously, there will not be a single human on this earth to experience life the same way that I will, and that is what essentially is the diversity of the human experience.
Another assignment that senior inquiry did was our Perspolis Essay. Persepolis is a story of an Iranian girl who grew up during the islamic revolution. During the book we see her experince countless situations of discrimination based on both her gender (female) and race. This book, although when I had read it we had yet to have discussions about the diversity of the human experience, was the first book to call to my attention just how different life experiences can be based on gender, color, and class. The story of Persepolis also gave me insight into policital events during the setting of the story allowing me to better observe or have more opionions of policitcal events that have occurred recently.