LO 1 Identifying own strengths and develop areas for personal growth

LO 5 Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively

Being in the humanities magazine for grade 11 was a choice I made due to me being able to identify my strength of being a good critical reader and writer. I thought something like being part of a magazine would be a great place for me to put my writing skills to practice, seeing as my 3 HLs are all essay based subjects as well. However, being part of the activity also made it so that I was able to make a lot of identifications of my own weaknesses and where I could improve in not only the way that I write, but the way I work in a team. We were slotted into roles such as editors, layout team, etc. with everyone getting the chance to be a writer. Being someone who is keen about writing and who feels confident in such a skill, I was keen to take on the role of editor and did so with confidence. I was able to edit several articles that were written by members of our activity, and talk to different people of different grades and see what their thought process was about while they were writing the work that I edited. I think that editing others people work was key in giving me insight to my own writing process; for example, recognising something good that someone else did with the way that they wrote something gave me ideas of my own for the kind of things I wanted to write about. It was a beneficial process in that I was able to draw inspiration from reading and editing other pieces of writing.

I think that the biggest strength of the magazine was that there was a strong sense of collaboration between everyone. By splitting up everyone into different organisations and different roles and responsibilities, it was easy to see how each different department had to work together until putting together the final product meant everyone was working with everyone else. It was easy to see the benefit of such collaboration, seeing as we were able to come to a consensus about a number of things, such as the layout team’s designs, the formatting of articles, deciding on article titles and a lot more. In the end, everyone came together and made it a team process and this was the most important take away for me, to see how such teamwork was beneficiary.

4. Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences.

Coming to the end of G11 saw the end of my tenure in the humanities magazine. It was something that I felt very passionate about doing, and thoroughly enjoyed my opportunity to write a double feature for the first magazine of the year. We were able to show commitment and perseverance in the way that we were actively creating material for the magazine while also spending time selling and distributing it to the school public. I think we recognised well the role we had to play as the creators of the magazine, but also those who were distributing the magazines around too. It was perseverance and commitment on our part to spend some of our own time, especially during events such as the 3 way conferences, to sell the magazines to parents and students alike.

7. Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions.

Finally, I think the biggest lesson learned was recognising the ethics of choices and actions taken, especially on a public forum like a magazine. I was really able to understand the conditions that are placed on a writer in terms of how they have to be aware of their target audience, while recognising certain sensitivities that might not be as explicitly on the surface as others. There are certain nuances when it comes to sharing one’s perspectives in a magazine, and it was really helpful to understand the different ways in which certain language might evoke different responses from different people.