Research Projects
On this page you can find various research projects I worked on while at Michigan State University. Some projects were done as part of my coursework and some were done outside of the classroom.
Table of Contents
Portfolio Project: "The City in Crisis"
Other Featured Blogs:
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Kayla Wikaryasz’s Citizen’s Project
Over the course of a semester, I worked on this portfolio project in sections. Each section of this project highlighted different aspects of European colonization in Michigan and how that has effected the modern design and living standards of Saginaw, Michigan, which was originally Native land.
Through my research, I discovered how Michigan Governor Lewis Cass was instrumental in the treaty of 1819, a treaty that resulted in large cessions of Native territory.
This was an interesting discovery because I was an enrolled student at Michigan State University at the time of conducting this research. Michigan State University is a Land Grant Federal Institution that sits on ceceed terrioty from the treaty of 1819. For the rest of the semester, this project changed the percpective I had on being a student at Michigan State University.
I also learned there is a correlation between original Native trails and the modern espressways framework that exists in Michigan today. Again, this was an interesting discovery because I was making many trips along these expressways to get from school in Lansing to my home in Posen, Michigan and back. To think that I was driving over my ancestral foot paths was unnerving at times.
Portfolio Project: "The City in Crisis"
This essay was part of a final collection of works representing the bulk of my indepedent coursework apart from normal class instruction. As an aspiring writer, and a student among other aspiring writers, it is important to understand the privilege that comes with the industry. Prior to taking this Literary Publishing course, I did not realize the extent to which the BIPOC community was underrepresented in publishing.
In this essay, I explore how systematic racism exists in the publishing world, and how as a white, cis-female I can support suppressed voices. This project also helped me find a passion for advocating for voices that may have been historically surpressed. In a future career, I would like to work to advocate for storytellers that have been, previously, notoriously suppressed by corporate America.
Apart from discovering the seedy underbelly of the publishing world, this Literary Publishing course was also designed to challenge students to curate an anniversary edition of The Red Cedar Review (an undergraduate ran literally magazine). The anniversary edition was to be a collection of archived pieces from the past sixty years of its history. Through this process, students were asked to reckon with the past, and to question wether or not pieces wrote in the sixties still had merit in 2022/23. To do that, we had to dig into the historical context of every piece we chose.
As a group of young people, we had experienced an unprecedented pandemic that altered our early years of adult hood. This was the basis for approaching the anniversary edition. It was also the basis for how we approached many of the topics I discussed in my essay.
Much of the work that made up this course was working with archival Red Cedar Review materials and gauging its relevancy to a modern audience. With my peers, we were tasked with picking short stories and poems that could be included in a 60th aniversey edition of the RCR. We were assigned individual issues to read and analyze. To do this we created a Table of Contents for each issue, recorded notes for 'Overall Aesthetics,' wrote submission arguments for our picks, and included an argument for diversity.
This work was enlighteing, because it taught me all of the different types of tasks editorial professionals often engage in.
Further, this experience exposed me to genres of writing that I would not have been exposed to otherwise. Prior to this class, I did not know that there were literary journals out there besides The New Yorker or The Paris Review.
Because I was challenged to make arguments for each of my proposed archived works, it forced me to read critically and to pay attention to details that I would of otherwise missed. In doing so, I have become more detail oriented and persice in my langauge.
OER Study Abroad Lessons
Below are some pictures that I took while traveling in Latvia and Lithuania. I made sure to take a variety of pictures that represented daily life and were photos that could spark discussion between students learning Russian.
During my time in Latvia, I would consistently record my observations in a shared document with my professor. These observations could pertain to anything from bathroom etiquette to international travel.
When I reconvened with my professor at Michigan State University, she and I sat down and made an outline of the lesson we wanted to create.
We turned that outline into a draft of a lesson plan, and I used my graphic design skills to create graphics so that the lesson activities were interesting and engaging.
