This project was all about ourselves as humans, and how we fit in with and around eachother. As humans, we have a need for connection with on another, so we are socialized from a young age on how to fit in with eachother. We are told who we should be and how we should act as who we are, and this first socialization helps determine our future personalities and actions. This project took the socialization we were told to follow and broke it into peices so that we could discover who we are in ratio to others. We were required to write and essay, create a mask on how we were socialized, and take part in an interactive exhibition on the cycle of socialization.
My Mask
My Essay
My Personal Reflection
1.Explain how you grew as a writer in this project. Be specific, go back through your essay to find evidence. I personally have always loved writing. So the skills to write have usually come easy to me. This project, I had to make the writing personal to me, which was new. I seem to find, I can personally reflect well if you let me brainstorm, but writing and essay on my personal socialization felt difficult. As a writer, I grew in the planning process of writing. Personal reflections have always been something I just jump into without a plan. With the essay that is shown above I had to re evaluate my reasonings and find how they related to me. I wanted to take the easy way out and just write an essay and be done with it, but Sara helped push me to relate the essay to myself and make sure I was connecting to my writing. 2.What are your largest take-aways from this project and how have they transformed they way you see the world? This could be from any part of the project: the content, the essay and mask, the design thinking process, or the exhibition prep. Before this project, I was unaware of how many stereotypes were still very prominent in our country. We all have biases and stereotypes, either from personal experience or from socialization making us blind to them. I personally will remember the video we watched on race in America. This video was called "A Girl Like Me." It shocked me how women around the country are ashamed of their skin color because they are not white. I was unaware of this and personally now when I look around the world I see the privileges I was given by just being born. The video is shown down below my reflection
3. What were your goals as a group worker and what challenges/success did you have reaching your goals? Make sure to include an example or story that highlights your response. My design thinking group was the beginning of socialization. We definitely has success and challenges that came up. Three of my group members and I did most all of the work, which was a struggle when we were supposed to have a large group effort into the building itself. We also had some conflicts of interest in the room. We had many different ideas that we applied and took away at the last minute. This project was a good experience on how cooperate with members you might now perfectly get along with. In the end, I would say it was a large success, and we got tons of great and positive feedback on our work as a team. I remember the moment we ran out of masks and still had a ton of people coming through. Instead of freaking out and giving up, me and a peer when to the exit of the exhibition and collected the communities member's masks to bring back and reuse. Through collaboration, we solved a unexpected problem.
4. Describe what you did as a group member and how it contributed to the success of our exhibition. Include in your answer how you would grade your effort and why. I felt like in this project was one of the projects I put a ton of effort into as a group member. Lily and I were both performance, and along with making a video for the front room, we were two of the main people who helped put the room together. We worked on this project for three days straight, planning and placing our room together piece by piece. For example, when we were faced with the issue of having time to build our room because of the offices in the front, Kate, Lily, and I all decided to make a plan that would only take a day to build. We wanted the space to be transformed, but we knew there wasn't a ton of time. We layed out the curtains, measured the walls, and moved what we were allowed to. If we hadn't prepared and made these things happen before we could build onto it, we wouldn't have had enough time to finish our room. I feel like as a group member I deserve an A for this. I pushed my group members and they pushed me to create the best work that is possible from the time and space we had. I brought in personal supplies from home, I was a performer and a builder, and I helped keep people on task. I also stayed through other classes and made up work so I could finish the room.