To begin our reflection process on project week, we decided to plan a video/documentary/moving pictures thing. The mentor text that isn’t a text but is rather a video. Our final post will be done collaboratively, we will plan it together, and Sophia in her capacity as the media coordinator, will edit the videos. As for future-ready we will be using, resilience, perseverance, caring, self-awareness, and UWC skills and qualities. We will document the perspectives of our service partners, some of the “service” we do, and also the activities we do. Maybe just some fun experiences as well. We will interview Mr. Thy about the importance of education, maybe some of the kids as well, and other people in the community on their opinions of the school. Just put it all in. We will have a very long video. It too will be a video with human beings who speak. So, we will be using the mentor source. Perhaps the video will give us ideas of question to ask.
Month: March 2018
Daraja GC (LO6)
After run for rights we haven’t been doing as much at Daraja in terms of the UWC community at large. However, I’ve been doing this small project where for approximately twenty minutes each lesson I do a presentation on an issue to do with women’s rights or education world wide. Most recently, we did FGM. There was a presentation and it was honestly very disappointing because there was a group discussion, and I felt that many of the people in the GC weren’t engaged. They just didn’t particularly care about women’s rights that weren’t in their everyday lives, and I don’t know how to change that. However, I do know that in showing people global issues like FGM, and raising awareness, perhaps we can make some change. In this way we’ve been engaging with issues of Global Significance, not only by raising money for girls education at Run for Rights, but also by raising awareness and thinking critically about issues relating to gender equality and education.
Odyssey (LO5)
In December I was in line to get food at Santai, and I ran into Manuel who was doing tech week for Candide. He invited me up to the tech booth to watch what he was doing, and I realized it was really interesting that I actually wanted to spend more time on it. So, I asked him if I could help out with The Odyssey, and thus my very own odyssey began.
SUNDAC Local Service(LO4)
Daraja (LO3)
Following the turn of the year, we decided to reorganize the GC into different groups. I ended up heading a group centered around creating short activities at the beginning of each meeting for the purpose of widening group members’ knowledge of issues surrounding our GC’s main topics, women’s rights, education, and human rights specifically in Africa. This was near the end of the year, so we didn’t do many presentations. Some members of the group did a presentation on the #MeToo movement. One activity I was directly involved with was a presentation and discussion on female genital mutilation. I was pleasantly surprised that many embers of the GC knew what FGM was, but disappointed that they didn’t know much more than the definition. I found it very difficult to get group members to truly engage in with the subject. I even tried splitting the discussion into smaller groups but found that they just wouldn’t discuss the issue. I know that it’s an extreme oversimplification to say that no one cared, but I certainly felt that there was a lack of passion surrounding the issue. I worked on this project with two other girls, and we were all rather frustrated by the lack of audience participation. However, it wasn’t a complete failure, because at the very least, those listening learned a bit more about the subject. In future, I’m not sure what I can do to make people care more about activities I lead. Some activities will be flops, but I think it’s important not to give up, and remember that you may have stimulated thought in others without even knowing it.