Before starting this class I was unsure how vastly mermaids and merfolk stories correlated to our environment. Furthermore, my understanding of mermaids was limited to the more widely told Western stories such as “The Little Mermaid.” I entered this class with an open mind, ready to learn, and as each week passed I found myself bewildered by all that merfolk tales communicated about the world, and how we impact it and are impacted by it. It is due to this class that I have seen how humanity and the environment are so interconnected. Whether that be through history, language, societal expectations, and how people identify. 

I believe the moment that the class really was around week six during our reading of Melusine. I really started to understand exactly how people’s views on the environment shape our understanding of our world and how we tell stories. This insight also comes from our class practice in close reading, which indisputably helped in my understanding of the texts that we read. My close readings, especially from Melusine on, are what has helped me most in my learning of this class. There is an art to taking what is simply on a page and making observations and an understanding of it. 

Moreover, I appreciate that we were able to look beyond Western stories for learning about merfolk and the environment. As we have learned from this class, our tellings of history are flawed because we do not have perspectives beyond the ones we deemed were worth telling. Yet history is not just what is in the textbooks we receive in school, history is in art, architecture, and especially literature. So to be able to get a more rounded view of merpeople folktales and the environment of other peoples and cultures, is the opportunity to learn a history yet unheard by a majority. It is from this class that I have learned about what it means to read stories in critical and thoughtful ways. I have learned to look beyond the conventional perceptions of stories and question what the story is asking of us.