Final Reflection

Our final class project was eye-opening to say the least. I learned a lot about the city of Baltimore and it's inhabitants. I always felt I was doing more than a school project; what we were trying to accomplish was too important and necessitated much more work, effort, and cooperation than a school project would have needed.

This project provided us with life experience. We had to work very closely with our group members and with the community of Baltimore. These were the most important elements of the project: needing to work as part of team and having to understand and properly portray the story of the people of Baltimore who's voices go unheard. These cannot be changed for future students taking this course.

Working as a team and knowing your role in it worked great for my group, but I believe the cooperation and dedication we had to one another was fairly unusual. I think that in order to best prepare groups for the work they will be doing, they need to do some kind of group work or activities before hand, however I'm unsure of how to best do this. Possibly groups could simply learn how to edit audio or have mock interviews with each other just to figure out what everyone is best at, they could work on easier assignments first that require teamwork, or maybe they could go into Baltimore to start getting a more personal understanding of what they are doing.

This semester, the most important thing I learned was that race still plays a very large role in today's society than I believed it ever could; people are still clearly discriminated against without the world at large knowing about it. I honestly wasn't sure what I expected to learn from this class, but I feel that I have become more aware of the world around me after this course. I was guilty of making assumptions of people who don't deserve that. I consider the history of what has happened in our country that has affected them personally and had a great influence in both placing them in the horrible living conditions, or lack there of, that they must endure, and in earning them unjust assumptions and treatment from the world around them.

Now what I want to know is what can be done to, at a local level, make the lives for Baltimore citizens normal, uninfluenced by the past. I know that it would at least require for the city of Baltimore to provide plenty of affordable and healthy housing, but that won't be enough; and on a national level that probably won't even scratch the surface. On a personal level, I need to not fall back into old ways, and try to help others understand what's happening where I can. Hopefully, if enough people were to do this it would eventually inspire positive change. Change is hard for a lot of people though, they're afraid of it even if it leads to the greatest possible outcome. How do you combat that?