A Reflection of an All-Girls Education Experience
Reflection Paper
This project was a lot of work to take on with only a week left of school, but I think our group rose to the task quite nicely. We collaborated well and met everyday after the project was assigned which paid off. I am personally proud of where we stand and I think our project is good.
As far as where our ideas came from, we embarked on an interesting adventure. Originally prepared to make a video about Marina’s project, we made a late executive group decision to change and produce mine. The thought behind this was that we already had 3 years worth of photos and video to use from my school, and I felt as though I was confident enough in my abilities to do a voiceover. That being said, you know how much time I put into project 3, and we were not sure if it was polished enough for a video. To make this video, we started with looking at my “who cares” section. We decided that the main idea behind this section is the benefits of single sex education. From this, we decided we would start a little bit broader to encompass education as a whole. This is where we used google earth, which we will talk about a little later. The piece that I would like to contribute to this memo is how I saw my auto ethnography come to life. I thought it was really interesting to get an opinion from all of my group mates. In workshop, we give each other feedback, but everyone is mainly concerned with fixing their own project. With this, mine was the center of attention and I saw my group mates pull it apart. Next, it was cool to really show what I was trying to say in a form that was not just words on a page. I felt I was really engaging the audience in a conversation — something we have been focusing on all semester (I made it! — This is the position I was hoping to be in when leaving the class — yay!) Hopefully you remember my process from project 3, but incase you don’t, let me give you some of the highlights. I put my paper through many drafts — and each time I changed a lot! I basically put my whole paper in a blender to reorganize it after workshop. I then went to look at the actual content and changed some things (like sentence structure and more they say/I say). After my first office hours meeting with you, I found more good sources to use, and then after my final meeting with you I went into the proofreading revision stage to fix some of my LOCs. It was an easy topic for me to write about because I loved my high school and I enjoyed making a video out of it. – Zoe
Project 4 was for sure an adventure, just the idea of creating a video, using tools that some of us were not familiar with and managing our busy schedules in the last few weeks of class was for sure not easy. Overall, we worked really well together, we brought up each of the member’s strengths and combined them in order to achieve a good result. During the first few meetings and class discussions we felt a little lost. We felt like we would not be able to make through the due date. We had so many ideas, so many things to say, so many different ways of thinking, we did not know how to even start the project. Thanks to Professor Giovanelli, who gave us a lot of directions and resources that could be helpful, we started to plan our process. The first step was to come into an agreement of which story we wanted to tell the other students, what would be interesting and would draw attention? At first, Marina’s story seemed to be the perfect fit to do the video, her story was interesting, we thought others would enjoy watching it. Nevertheless, we soon realized that even though Marina’s story was really compelling, it would be hard to find sources that did match her purpose and audience. It felt like maybe Marina’s story was a little too broad to be transformed into a video. As a result, we all re-read all group members’ auto ethnography and came to an agreement that Zoe’s topic would be the best fit. She had a good number of sources, a great story and a good level of details that would make the video enjoyable: the video would be the story of Zoe Johnson and her unique experience of having a single-sex education. – Marina
Once we decided what we were going to do the project about, we needed to get as much material as we could to make a video. We gathered personal pictures on Zoe during her time at St. Mary’s, videos of the school, and other outside pictures. We found that we had plenty of “I say” from Zoe’s personal accounts, but not a whole lot of “they say”. We struggled a bit, but found some good quotes by researchers from her project 3. We needed to make sure that they say was well represented and would work more on this after our meeting with Professor Giovanelli. Another part that we struggled with was the Google Earth. We thought the globe zooming in on the school would be a neat idea, and it turned out great. It took us a couple times to zoom in close enough, but we think we got it smooth enough. We also downloaded music and videos from YouTube to be used in our presentation. We spent a lot of time on the citations and giving credit during the video because we wanted to make sure that we were giving the proper amount of credit to our outside sources. After we found enough material online and from Zoe’s personal accounts, we filmed some in-person videos, just to change it up a little and not have everything coming from an outside source. When we added all of these things to iMovie, we started to voice over the pictures and videos with Zoe’s reflection. This came out very well the first time we tried, which saved us a lot of time. Throughout the development of the video each of us brought great ideas to the table. It was hard to incorporate all of those ideas, but everyone was good at compromising and working towards a final common goal of finishing the best project in the class. – Eli
If we had more time, we could have potentially added more detail to the video by shooting more scenes rather than having the voice over with pictures for the majority of the film. Overall, we worked very well as a group. Since we didn’t have much time in class to work on this project, we had to collectively find times throughout a very stressful few weeks to work. We met several times a week for the last few weeks and like all challenges, hit a few speed bumps and had some problems that needed to be fixed. When we met, we worked efficiently and created organized and thorough checklists of things that had to be done. We used our collective creative ideas to bring the story to the screen. As a result, we believe we have created a very strong video that accurately represents the message that Zoe was portraying in her auto ethnography. – Joe
Thank you for a wonderful semester,
Eli, Zoe, Marina, and Joe
April 29, 2017
Eli James
