Besides for school purposes obviously, I write to clear my mind and express myself in ways that I’m not the best verbally. Writing has always been therapeutic to me and though my love for writing is more so in narrative writing, when writing academically I often get carried away going in too deep into my own thoughts. This semester showed me writing is more than just putting your words and thought on paper, but the work done beforehand to better prepare and educate yourself allows you to accurately reflect and draw connections. Before the semester, I only liked personal writing such as storytelling and poetry, but I began to enjoy other forms of writing such as advocacy even for groups I don’t belong to.
Starting first with the first essay we did, the peer interview essay, I believe this essay helped me develop my researching skills utilizing double entry notes, sitting back and letting the interviewee speak and guide the conversation in a freeway. It also helped me understand how to better question, looking for the less obvious information and even utilizing body language to draw conclusions instead of just words. Moreover, it assisted me with devising strict outlines and editing as there was a lot of interesting information worth discussing but I had to understand to condense for the sake of the paper. Finally, one of the most important is that it taught me to check my bias not only in life but in my writing, I may put my own ideas and perspectives in writing pieces where they don’t belong, this forced me to write from an unbiased perspective.
In the second essay, the community observation, I tasked myself with choosing a community I knew less about and one many probably didn’t recognize either to both challenge myself and bring awareness. The skill discussed in the previous paragraph about choosing something to focus on was also used in the community observation and advocacy plan as there were so many issues faced by the community I chose and so much to speak about that felt interesting and worth speaking on. I learned that while you may be interested in a lot, it would be best to condense and focus on one thing to really emphasize and get a point across. The community observation and the peer interview called for the most critical thinking and forced me to check my own biases when writing to remain as objective as possible. The creative piece of the project also interested me as I had to try to spread information by understanding different perspectives objectively. Finally, this paper in my opinion made research more interesting than the peer-reviewed journals, focusing on individuals and communities and their suffering was more interesting and a vastly unique experience.
The easiest of the essays and the final of the three was the literature review as I have done an annotated bibliography before, and this required the least critical analysis and therefore was simple and didn’t require much growth or understanding. It did, however, help me with deciphering what information I wanted to use and how I wanted to use it, taking away the risk of adding too much unnecessary information. The main takeaway from this essay was understanding what i want to get from a piece of text, focusing on the information itself and how it will help me allowed me to better utilize information and to better cite.
I believe i achieved the course objectives as in the welcome unit the main objectives from my interpretation were to better write using critical thinking and analysis alongside skilled note-taking from observations and pieces of text. I believe it highlighted and shown in my papers my ability to not only understand whatever I’m observing but to receive the information objectively and apply it appropriately to provide deeper perspectives and analysis, alongside tying it to other key pieces of information. This also plays into the research portion of the objectives as my research felt more detailed, better organized and more useful. The research I conducted I this class felt more necessary than just meeting a criteria for a paper but added to the paper and was vital to getting the point across and for better understanding overall. It was stated in the beginning of the semester that we would be acting as a social scientist and I believe I accomplished that as well by doing effective research, efficiently analyzing this research and finally advocating properly. Finally beyond the writing aspects and objectives of the course, I feel like I grew as not only a researcher and writer but also as an individual. I feel more aware of my biases and more importantly it introduced advocacy to me more formally and the many ways to advocate groups. It also emphasized the importance of advocating, not only for the groups you belong in, but also for ones you don’t belong to as well. I was working on a project before the semester started and I see myself using information learned in this class, more specifically the 5 steps of advocacy to better jumpstart the project I was working on as well.
Moving forward, I would like to focus more on systemic forms of marginalization, and understanding the laws and systems set in place. Additionally, as stated previously, a goal of mine is to work on projects I have mentioned doing in the past but have not fully executed or even deeply explored through the lens of a social scientist and advocate. In hopes of helping individuals affected by breast cancer and in the future low-income children from “bad areas”, I plan to devise full-blown plans using what I learned in this course to help me. What I appreciated the most in this course was the diversity of content. Beyond the same marginalized groups discussed, we also highlighted many that aren’t often talked about and were able to understand them and their suffering.
