My Movie

Curricular Competency Reflection

How did your journals support your preparation for your final assessments?

While preparing for the final assessments, I was able to go back to my past journals so that I could see my past thinking while reading the book and used some of the information I put in my journals as sources for my presentations.

How did the graphic organizer help you connect your novel(s) with the sub-themes?

The graphic organizers helped me lay out what sources I wanted to use to back up the points I would talk about when we would write essays. They also allowed me to pre-write what points I wanted to talk about in my essays so that when I went into the essay, I wouldn’t struggle with what to say. The graphic organizers also helped to connect my novel to the sub-themes because I got to lay out my definition of relationships and the “big ideas” made it easy to pick out examples from my sources.

How did participating in the circle help you formulate your ideas for the essay write?

By participating in the circle, I could get new perspectives about my sub-theme that helped when formulating ideas for the essay write, as some people offered insight that I originally wouldn’t have thought of before.

How did you choose what you would do to create the personal connection piece?

I decided to write a song because I’ve written multiple songs before, and it is something that usually comes quite easy to me, especially when there’s something clear that I’m writing about. The fact that we had already gone through the theme of relationships and power extensively also helped in generating lyric ideas for the song.

Core Competency Reflection

An example of where I built upon someone else’s ideas is during our circles, as I was able to provide insight about relationships and how it related to my novel after listening to another person who had read the same book that I did. They explained certain aspects of the book and how the themes within the book related to the theme of relationships, such as the familial relationship that the main character has with the other members of his group. I was able to add on about how their experiences created the circumstances in which they were able to become a family.

I can contribute to and work with criteria to improve my own work; evidence of that is also during our circles. At the start of the semester, I was very awkward when it came to public speaking and wouldn’t make eye contact very much and was clearly nervous. However, as time went on, I got feedback on what I could do to improve. I’ve gotten better at being more engaged with the audience and generally being less nervous.

I can describe how the identities of Indigenous communities relates to my experience growing up in Canada as a 2nd-generation immigrant. We learned about the struggles with identity that Indigenous people face, as their identities as Indigenous people are sometimes not recognized, or they are placed in a box in which they don’t fit, or they are shamed for their identity. I related to this as I was often put into situations where I was shamed for my culture and forced to assimilate to what was considered “normal”, and have had a similar struggle with feeling as though I was a stranger to two different cultures.