Week 7 at CrossRoads (blog 8)

This week was exciting in terms of my project at CrossRoads! I feel confident that at this point my curriculum, which I have been working on for the past eight weeks in addition to the other intern duties, is at the point in which it can be presented to high school students. While unfortunately since it is summer, I do not think I will be able to present it to a group of high school students but sometime this coming week we are planning to present my curriculum to my supervisor, Julie, and hopefully my Wake Forest advisor, Stephanie Trilling. I do think that there will be comments from those I present to on ways in which I can improve my curriculum but right now I am claiming that it is finished! When I leave I intend to leave a printed teachers booklet with all the notes and activity instructions for the complete curriculum as well as an electronic copy with all the information and visuals with CrossRoads to use, in the upcoming school year when going to the high schools. I created this curriculum and the activities within to be able to be interpreted and adapted if need be to better fit the environment. Some problems I ran into while creating the information was finding ways in which to teach students about sexual assault while also not misleading them for what the law says. To do this I ended up having to re-do a large section in my curriculum and instead of giving definitions I shifted to giving legal information on different laws which are pertinent to high school students in their relationships. The reason it is important to not just teach definitions without considering legal definitions is because you don’t want to teach people things that aren’t okay and you don’t want people to assume they have rights where they don’t have any. I hope now that I have gotten my curriculum to a place which not only tells students the morally correct information but the legal information which keeps them from committing any sexual misconduct, during their time in high school and then being able to apply it later in their life.
While this week was pretty exciting in terms of feeling like I have completed my curriculum for the time being the office had a slower week, though for the summer it was a pretty consistent movement of people. Since this was the first week back after the other intern finished her internship, I was placed back up at the reception area. Being here I am able to interact much more with the clients who come in. For this week I would say my largest highlight was getting to interact with the clients, because there were a couple of times in which I was in charge of the children while the parents were in the back meeting with our advocates and people who come in will sometimes talk with me before going back. I also got the chance to be at the reception area and interact with our detectives who come in for forensic interviews as well as being up front for a couple of subpoenas that came through for some of our employees. It was exciting to see so many different aspects of the process that our clients go through. I am excited to go back to work next week and present my curriculum and get to be more a part of the processes that CrossRoads goes through.