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Our Interactive Presentation
For our final presentation to share with the class what we learned from this class hope, elly, skindeep, hannahgisele and I had the class head outside and set up in a line, what would become a spectrum. We each formulated a statement from each of our 5 texts (beginning with Darwin and ending with Adaptation) and read them to our classmates one at a time, asking them for each question to orient themselves on our imaginary between "agree" and one end and "disagree" at the other. We then asked them to talk amongst themselves about why they chose the place on the spectrum that they did, and invited them to move if they changed their minds after the discussion.
We thought that we would see more movement than we did, but I think that if we had more time and allowed for more sharing to the group by individuals of why they chose the place they did that there would have been. We decided to go with a more physically interactive presentation because we noticed that when we are all together as a large group there are many people who don't speak up. We wanted everyone to make their stance on each statement known, even if they didn't do so verbally. And often a physical presence is more powerful than a verbal one anyway. I think the presentation went well, people seemed engaged and really responded to our questions, and I enjoyed being able to end our class by moving beyond the classroom, just as we will now do with what we learned and questioned over the past semester.