Group Presentation

Oops! In all the pre-trip excitement/chaos I forgot to post my blog this week! I hope this reaches you all in a not TOO delayed fashion. 

This week, I am going to blog about my group presentation on language diversity. Riley and I both worked on the portion of the presentation that connected the theme of language diversity, specifically in Ghana, to the theoretical frameworks we had opened in class at the beginning of the semester.  Undergoing this process was highly valuable for a few reasons.  For one, it gave us a way to reflect back on the texts we had read and the theories we had come to understand as valuable contributions to the discipline.  Also, we were able to observe tangible situations for the theories and seem them more practically applied.  Theoretical frameworks always have the ability to expand our knowledge base and encourage a deeper level of thought, and this was a very valuable experience, for the presentation, and for ourselves as well. Now looking at it and our presentation as a whole, the theory we had uncovered as pertinent to the discourse only began to brush upon the frameworks we could have opened up.  Language acquisition theories would have also been a very interesting segment of theory to open up for discussion, and could have added to the overall message and value of our presentation. 

Group projects, in my experience, always seem to initiate an interesting conversation in education classrooms.  Not only for the material that they bring up, but also in the pure nature of sharing with each other. This group project distinctly identified different ways in which we all (members of the presenting group) work, an arguable literacy in and of itself.  I think, as a group, we found that we each had a very different way of working on projects and learning.  Negotiating these skill sets with each other proved to be challenging in a way that I have never experienced before, much like acquiring and mastering a new literacy, but at the same time, was very valuable.