After taking Communication and the Black Diaspora(COMM300) these are my reflexions for the semester:
I like how interactive this class was, it wasn't only focus on covering the materials but also on discussions. Students was given the opportunity to express their thoughts about the different topics. It was a safe place that supports interactive and active learning with engaging content that made us eager to learn more about covered topics. But it sometime takes up too much time and affects the material timeline.
One assignment that I think that I learned the best doing was the movie review. My movie was Women King that was inspired by the real life Agojies from the kingdom of Dahomey present Benin. I liked how this assignment was structured, it was divided in two: the individual written movie review then the group video movie review. This assignment was one of my smoothest group projects, because everyone already did their personal work we didn't have to deal with some group members knowing the content and others not contributing. Everyone had knowledge on the topic as a whole, breaking the norm of group projects where you focus on only one part of the topic because of time restrictions and end up not grasping some concepts. It also opened my eyes on not believing everything that I see and always researching even the things that I concider only entertainment. This project transformed a movie that I was anticipating as shedding light on African women fight against slavery to a history lesson on our contributions to slavery.
My top 3 things that I learned this semester are:
• I was always taught that the triangular trade was between Europe, Africa, and America but as foreigner I always assumed America referred to the United States. I learned that America included countries such as Cuba, Haiti, Dominican Republic and many more. Learning about slavery in Cuba and Haiti and the similarities/differences with slavery in the United States was an eye opener.
• During our unit on how to check the validity of a Story I learned two new skills that I never heard about: you can check what a place looked like on a specific date on google maps, you can check websites archives for specific dates and it will show you that website on that date.
• During our Critical Race Theory module I discovered the fiction story "The Space Traders" by Derrick Bell. It was for me the best reading material assigned during the semester. This story treated real life black struggles and CRT debates in a brilliant fiction form. It captivated my attention during the whole time reading it and made me want to know what happened next at the end of the story.
For future students that are planning to take this course I would advise to pay attention to discussions and ask all clarifying questions during that time as it will most likely shape the class assignments. Even though I had a hard time to follow along the class for personal reasons, I think the material is not overwhelming for students and the paced is reasonable.
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