Assignment Description:
Final Reflection – Reflect on your learning objectives. What did you do to support meeting your objectives? What specific learning moments assisted you? What would you do differently? What do you feel really good about? Summarize your community statement, case study and final research and discuss how you navigated these projects and what you learned.
Learning Objectives
1. I will delve into all readings and assignments in order to better understand the community arts field.
2. I will establish my position within the community arts field and be able to articulate it.
3. I will use this class to build upon my research, specifically my literature review.
4. I will discover more community arts organizations and add to my list of possible employers.
5. I will participate fully but not dominate the conversation.
Final Reflection
I think I partly achieved all of my learning objectives. I say partly because I ended up veering in a different direction than I originally expected. For instance, while I had intended to use the assignments to specifically build up my literature review, I ended up researching tangential material for my interview and term paper. The interview was related to my research as in it was about digital storytelling, but it looked trauma healing instead of creativity. My term paper was also related because it looked at radio and facilitation styles, but it was not in the digital storytelling field and was focused on youth instead of adults. Thus, while these assignments will provide some information for my research, they are not as directly linked as I had originally intended.
This is not say that I feel what I learned from these assignments is not valuable. I greatly enjoyed interviewing Elaine at the Trauma Healing Project and gained an even greater understanding of the impact of digital storytelling. Furthermore, I was able to use this information to help Trauma Healing write a grant that will hopefully build up their digital storytelling series to be more sustainable. And while the term paper was difficult for me because I had to synthesize so much information, in the end, I am grateful for having done so. I have a much clearer understanding of what I’ve learned over since last year and how it all interconnects. This term paper also further clarified my understanding of the community arts field. I kind of wish we didn’t write (or re-wrote) our community arts statement at the end of class. If I were to do that, I would say that I see myself as a community arts organizer who hopes to use storytelling and dialogue in cultural programming for civic engagement. This realization has come from further research into arts-based civic engagement and my practicum experiences. Thus, by the end of the term I was able meet my second learning objective: “I will establish my position within the community arts field and be able to articulate it.” And I was able to better clarify what kind of job positions I am interested in and add to my list of possible employers.
The last learning objective is always the hardest for me to accomplish because I like to participate in discussion and have a hard time not doing so. I have often forced myself to share less but then I end up feeling less engaged in the process. Thus, this objective continues to be a struggle for me. While this class definitely did have a better balance of voices, I still feel I could have been less of a dominate voice. This is something I want to work on as a facilitator, both for recognizing how to use my voice but also how to help other use theirs. This is why I’m really excited to take a Conflict Resolution class next term on dialogue across difference. I think this will be a great application of interests in arts-based civic dialogue and a way to work on my own participation. Then I can continue my lessons from this class and eventually accomplish my goal of using dialogue and storytelling for civic engagement in cultural programming!