Group 1E SAPSA

Katrina Asuncion, Kimi Villaroman, Vince Olanda, Larry Wang

Group 1E

            Our SAPSA is about the ways that Asian Americans identify in terms of color. We especially focused on the ways Filipinx-Americans choose to identify, and where they fall on the spectrum of “brownness.” We often associate being “yellow” with being East Asian, and although the term has a racist history, it has been reclaimed by Asian Americans, as evinced by the Yellow Peril. We associate brownnesss with being Middle Eastern, Chicanx/Latinx, but brownness can also pertain to Asian Americans as well. Although Filipinx-Americans are members of the Asian American community, most do not identify as yellow due to their differing experiences that deviate from the monolithic Asian American experience. In our SAPSA, we hope to open up the dialogue regarding brownness to expand upon the fluidity of its defintion and validate the Filipinx-Americans that identify as brown, while emphasizing that these identifiers are still subjective and open to many interpretations. Our intended audience is anyone that may identify as brown or yellow, because we hope to open up the dialogue in the Asian American community and expand these ideas. Overall, we were able to discuss our desired topic, and we received a lot of insight from our interviewees, so we think that we accomplished what we set out to do. Although we only scratched the surface, we do believe that we began to open up this dialogue. We faced a challenge when some of our interview subjects expressed that they found identifying as yellow to be offensive, which we had not previously considered prior to filming. We also felt that we mostly got answers in which our interview subjects identified as brown, and we would have liked to get a variety of answers to show the fluidity of the terms. If we were to redo our SAPSA, we would have liked to interview more people, and not just a majority that identify as brown. In terms of the future, we hope to encourage others to challenge the ideas surrounding what “brown” means and what “yellow” means, and we hope to learn more about the impact and effects of these identities.

Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1ZOhZGzmez1ZWtZSEhWUDVwbVU/view?usp=sharing

3A SAPSA Presentation, Alan Sani, Don Atienza, Jowi Deguzman

Alan Sani
Jowi Deguzman
Don Elijah Atienza
A03



https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bz6quSn6em4CM0dhNmpOdHBYaTg

1. What is your SAPSA about?
1. For our project we wanted to shed light on a stereotype that even though we believe it is light hearted and harmless, it actually has origins from a darker past. We want to find a solution to dispelling stereotypes and we believe that the first step is being aware and educated.
2. The stereotype we want to examine and hopefully see it used less in casual conversation is “Why Filipinos love to entertain.”
2. Who is your intended audience?
1. We want this to be watched by everyone. The topic of stereotyping is something that should be discussed in all environments and by all people.
3. Did you accomplish what you set out to do?
1. From what we gathered in our interviews, we believe yes. We had a theory, did some research, and got opinions - some aligned with ours. We will truly feel accomplished if we get any comments after our video is presented, hopefully these comments will validate us.
4. What were the challenges?
1. The challenge was getting the interviews together and editing the video in a way the flowed together and contained all the information we wanted to discuss in 5 minutes.
5. What would you have done differently?
1. Our group agrees that time was very valuable for this project. If we had started maybe a week, even half a week, earlier we could have more footage to choose from.
2. Also, consistency was a main factor. If we had worked in small sessions instead of long bursts throughout the quarter, the stress would probably not affect us as much as it did.
6. What is the future of your SAPSA?
1. We hope that our topic will be remembered when it is brought up in conversation. For example, there may be an instance where a student unknowingly uses a stereotype that is inherently inappropriate. The hope is that the student harks back to our video and corrects their actions.
2. The topic itself is something that affects our group everyday in that we are actually people of this stereotype - we love to perform. With this video we have a different perspective on ourselves and we will try to spread this perspective onto others as well.

1F Final SAPSA: Not Your Narrative-Learning Through Other Lenses

Alice Kuang
Camille Abutin
Gabriel Cenizal
Section A01
6/5/17

Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1VCSygc3C4LaYq3sOWBiudKQCzqDZhkPKB5NR00ui3BI/edit?usp=sharing

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB8XoKeXViM

Our SAPSA project aims to shed light on the different narratives and perspectives of the Filipino identity and Filipino American Identity. The intended audience of our project are students K-12 or college level in hopes of enlightening them and helping them step back from American nationalist views and to encourage them to understand other societal norms and values from different cultural lenses. By using a highly controversial subject like President Duterte of the Philippines, our project highlights the Filipino American views vs Filipino views of him. To give context, President Duterte has gained a lot of criticism from the U.S. due to his violent war on drugs. Many Americans, including Filipino Americans, see Duterte as a villain and frequently use his presumed involvement in extrajudicial killings and vulgar mouth to set him in a bad light. On the other hand, the people of the Philippines show very high approval ratings for him. With that said, by using these altering points of views on President Duterte, we can begin to educate others on the importance of understanding different cultural and societal norms and how these different understandings contribute to the value of truth and empathy when it comes to our people.

As a group, we felt that giving our audiences authentic testimonies about their views on President Duterte made us successful in our goal. A couple of challenges we had was that we could not implement more background information about the subject in the video due to the time and none of our members had that much experience with video editing so there was a fairly large learning curve in the making of the video. Additionally we knew our audience was comprised of a younger generation, so we tried our best to make our video somewhat engaging by using a “draw my life” format in some of the video. If we could do anything differently, it would have been to draw out the “draw my life” portion first then narrate over it so that it’s a bit more aligned with the voiceover and gathered more testimonial content regarding why there’s such a difference in perspectives in Duterte. In many of the testimonials we had, the differences were explained merely as “It’s different here than it is in the Philippines,” although it is a valid statement, we feel as though our viewers should be given a more definite reason.

There is a lot of complexity in our SAPSA video, and we believe that the possibility of it becoming a video series in the future would be a great way of making the goal of our project more relatable and accessible to students of different ethnic backgrounds. In the video series, each video could highlight different controversial subjects in Asia and the Asian vs Asian American perspectives on it could be mentioned. We believe the future of our SAPSA is bright. Although we were not able to give a lot within five minutes, there is still more to learn and be told. By addressing the topic, we can only hope that others instill within themselves the information and critically analyze to better understand different political facets outside of what they only know.

2B Final SAPSA: International Admission

Rachel Wong, Anna Yang, Hoang Phuong Vy Nguyen

Professor Caroline Kieu Linh Valverde

TA: Kaozong Mouavangsou

ASA02 SAPSA Project

June 5, 2017

International Admission

Powerpoint: http://bit.ly/2stefkq  

Education is now a commodity sought by international students striving for what they perceive as a better education. Their pursuit of a Western education is a product of what A. A. Phillips coined as “culture cringe." Cultural cringe is an internalized inferiority complex, which causes people to view their own culture as inferior to the cultures of other countries. This creates a tendency to discount a lot of one's own culture, and embrace another country's ‘better' culture instead. In the case of international students, although they take pride in their own culture, they still associate Western culture and education as better. Thus, they are willing to pay any price tag even if it means they achieve academic and career successes. Though it is unclear as to whether their financial investments actually paid of, but with certainty:

• Higher education has transformed from a public good into a commodity on a transnational market.
• Universities have become the largest for-profit company, where students are its customers and faculty are its sellers.
• Understanding the increase in international students is only scratching the surface of grasping the corporate nature of universities

Even though our video specifically focuses on international students admission to UC Davis, we hope that everyone walks away with an open mind. Particularly for those who equates having a successful career with a college degree, all we ask of them is to do your research, consider their options, know what they are getting yourself into, and prevent themselves from overpaying for an experience that may or may not grant them their desired goal(s).

We came across a few obstacles during the making of this SAPSA. The biggest challenge was synthesizing content into the five-minute mark. It was difficult to include and synthesize interviews while ensuring that the overall message is still fitting and effective. Another obstacle was writing the script. We had to adjust the script several times because of the time limit, the content received from our interviews, and the feedback we received from our classmates. We also wanted to make sure that the SAPSA is informative and captivating, and that the audience would walk away with the same vision we had for this SAPSA.

Once we published our SAPSA, we created a survey and asked random individuals who were either international or domestic student to assess our video against on our objectives and goals. Majority of the feedback we received were positive as at least 85 percent of them said they learned something new, would walk away with an open-mind and that we met our objectives. We believe 85 percent is a fairly good number to achieve but if we were given the opportunity to revamp this SAPSA, we would certainly aim for 100 percent.

In the case that we were given the opportunity to remake this SAPSA, there are a few things we would like to improve. First of all, we want to better the informational and educational aspect of the video. We can achieve this by going beyond the five-minute limit to include ways in which universities have marketed themselves to students, more specifically, international students, to get them to apply. A few examples would be brochures/handbooks designed for international students brochure, sending representatives abroad to conduct outreach programs, and so on. We can also dig deeper by looking into the admission process at UC Davis, specifically, factors that determine a student's admission. Furthermore, extending the time limit will also improve our conclusion considering the one we currently went by very fast and ended quite abruptly. We believe with the extra time, we can slow down the voiceover and include a fade-to-black effect as this will better empower our message and vision for this SAPSA. Lastly, we would like to advertise our SAPSA to as many audiences as possible. To achieve this goal, we can post our video onto social media platforms such as Facebook and request our viewers to leave a comment. This way, we can actually generate conversations and evoke more reactions and further carry out our objective.