As Unit 2 has come to an end I am proud to say that I learned
a lot and got a chance to do things that I haven’t did before. Coming into unit
2 I was skeptical about working in a group but once I was comfortable it wasn’t
so bad and I actually enjoyed the experience. I enjoyed being able to bounce my
ideas off my group members and getting their opinion. I also enjoyed not having
to do everything on my own. Communication was a vital role in this unit. During
the beginning of this unit there was little or no communication in our group so
no one member knew what the other members were doing. This was a huge problem
because when the first part of our assignment was due no one had done it and we
had to put something together so that we can get credit. After this incident I worked
on being more open and outgoing. My instructor played a key role in this
transformation as well. The more questions the group had for her the more she
made us talk amongst each other and come to an agreement. Once all of our kinks
were out we then openly communicated with each other and stated which parts of
the project we will feel comfortable doing. One of my major accomplishments of
this unit would be writing a research proposal and research design. I had never
done this before not even in my prior science courses. It was a bit of a
challenge because I didn’t clearly know what was asked of me and after I completed
it I still wasn’t sure that it was right. When we reached the research design
portion I had to do research on my own of what a research design was because I had
no idea where to begin. After going thru many different research designs I came
up with my own. After a few revisions I finally grasped the concept of what
exactly my instructor wanted. Things that I have never done before until unit 2
is actually conduct research in a form that was not your usual academic
research paper. After conducting the research I learned how to track my results
in something called the research findings. Overall the point of unit 2 was to
see how society puts certain rules on genres and how they would react when you
change those rules. I think it was very effective for us to see this by actually
doing our own research on the genre of our choice. I chose to change the
content of a children’s book to that of a news article. From
my research I now know that if you change a genre to something out of the norm
people will automatically think it is wrong. Just by changing the content in
the book to long sentences with big words people thought that the book
shouldn’t be given to children. Immediately after reading the book people was
able to point out what was “wrong” with it. Although they could say what was
wrong about it they could not necessarily tell me why those things were wrong.
One individual actually said it’s wrong because no other children’s books are
made like that. What I got from my results is that people are afraid to put
society’s constraints aside because they feel like its only one right way to do
certain things.
