Group Final Project

Let me just say that in all honesty, working with the group I worked with was absolutely AMAZING!!!!!!!!!! I seriously loved it and it was honestly the best experience had working with a group. Up until this point in my life I have always somewhat hated working in groups because it has never been a group effort in the past groups I have worked in. It is always divide and conquer and meet up in a week- people want to be individual and take credit for everything they do- it has been very hard to truly experience the "group work" mentality and effort. But this time it was so different and I really loved working with everyone in my group. Obviously I have known Maria forever but I didn't know Peter, Mike, Emily or Lindsey prior to working as a group with them. At times it was difficult because someone would get a really great idea and before going forward with it we had to stop and think if it could be applied to all of the content areas involved. For my particular group we had math, social studies, library science, and three literacy specialits with backgrounds in special educatin and elementary education. Being an elementary education major, I have always been forced to look at topics from multiple perspectives because I did not pick a specific discipline, I was liberal arts so I picked three disciplines- math, social studies, and english for my undergrad. And I think naturally, elementary school teachers have to look at things from many different perspectives because they are typically the ones running the classroom and are responsbile for teaching all subject/content areas. Regardless, it was still a learning experience that "pushed" me.

Through working in my group I had to learn how to trust people. Typically in a group I would offer to do the majority of the work because I know I would do it and I would do it well. I had a hard time counting on other people because I would always invision something differently than others and I typically like to do things my way. From working with my group, I learned that you can acutally learn a lot and come up with really great ideas together, and that you can trust people to do their parts and they too will do it well. Of course we had little arguments a long the way in terms of the script and what to add and what to take out, but we were able to come together in attempts of making it the best it could be. We were fortunate enough to have really awesome people in our group, all of whom could be trusted to do good jobs. I learned that it is okay if I'm not in control 100 percent of the time and others have just as valid ideas. I know I would have never come up with the whole lesson my own and that's the beauty of working in a group- you develop amazing lessons. We had a lot of strong minded people in our group so that was a challenge at times because we all brought really great ideas to the table and it was hard to pick and choose which ones to use for the lesson we taught. I wish we had more time to teach, because I grew really connected to my lesson and actually would like to teach it in a real classroom to real high school/middle school ages students. I think that we had a hugh "so what" and that our lesson was so relevant to students today because we touched upong many issues they have dealt with or are dealing with. Intolerance is universal and relevant to the present, past and future. Althought it did take quite a while to agree on this issue and firstly it was more or less the topic of Salem Witch Trials but then we had to think about how that would be relevant to today or tie in to what adolescents are experiencing. Which lead us to the whole issue of intolerance/tolerance. So it acutally worked out quite well. Originally the group was divided between Native Americans and Holocaust and even the Great Depression. I was a bit reluctant to comply early on because like 4 out of the 5 members had agreed to do Native Americans until one spoke up and said she really wasn't in favor and we reevaluated and come up with issues of intolerance after we took a vote. In the end, we were all really excited because it was something that none of us were really familiar with so it was new and interesting. At times, it required a little more research and extra reading to get a deeper understanding of what exactly happened during that time period but it was well worth it because I learned a lot in the whole process and I think it is safe to say that all of the members in the group leanred a lot about each other, themselves and the content presented throughout our lesson. I was more than pleased with the final product. By starting with the history and relating it to today and discussing the various "witch hunts" over time, locally and globally, it really sends a powerdul message as to why intolerance is still present. Why is it? History is constantly repeating itself and we all have the power to change it and yet we don't. Are we funding intolerance or supporting institutions like the government or church that, when looked at with a critical lens, in fact are to some degree involved with intolerant acts? It is striking to think of such a thing. I think all semester we were learning about intolerance as well as evidenced in the viewing of the Hoover Elementary video and even the intolerance on behalf of schools and classroom teachers towards students' home litercies, popular culture, and cultural identities. Sadly even one has probably been intolerant of another person at some point in their lives, I know I am guilty of it. But through crafting that lesson and researching the statistics, it really hit close to home and I actually think (as pathetic as this sounds) that I have learned how to be more tolerant of others. Through making a blog and watching youtube videos from homosexuals points of view, I have seen the issue from their perspective and it makes you look at the situation completely different and I've learned to be more tolerant from doing this project.

If I could change one thing about the final product, if I could change anything, I would make it so that it never ended! I am really going to miss my group members and I am going to miss coming to class because I really had so much fun learning about everything I learned about. Time is always an issue and we unfortunately ran short on time and took a little longer than anticipated to get through the lesson so Mike and Emily were not alloted appropriate time to do what they would have liked to have done. I would change it so that they would have done their parts beacuse they had really powerful activities that really tied the issues of intolerance to present day. Emily's part was done in a sense because every one did break up into small groups and have a discussin about a zine. So at least in small groups we were able to get down to the nitty and gritty of some issues we currently are dealing with.

I am not so much sure if it taught me how to think differently in terms of my content area but it taught me how to work with others to make things better. So I guess that in turn that makes me look at my content differently because I realize that I may not know the best ways to teach things but throught consulting and working with others I can learn.

This was the first time I actually was planning out how to use multimodality throughout the lesson. I have used different modes before but never really thought about it. When planning this lesson we kept going back and asking ourselves the different modes we were using and making sure that we were presenting the information in a variety of ways and that all the modes were working together in a cohesive manner. We delibertly planned out using blogs, websites, books, scripts, movies, youtube videos, zines, newspaper articles, graphics, surveys, political cartoons, pictures, visual images, quotes, etc. I will definitely take the whole idea of multimodality with me in the classroom and I have learned to look at my content area differently because of multimodality.

If I were to teach this lesson inside of my own classroom, I wouldn't change too much except for modifying the information so that it is more appropriate to students and their age/ development. I would probably focus more on respecting everyone and embracing differences and teach them to tolerate others so that intolerance could perhaps fade in the future.