Happy New Year, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and welcome back to my blog everyone! I haven’t posted since early December so I’m glad to be back in the blogging world. Today’s post is surrounding the topic of the annual PLP winter exhibition and I will be doing a reflection on how the night went, my performance, and what I can do better next time (spring 2019). Every winter and spring, PLP hosts an exhibition in which students from each grade showcase their work to an audience of roughly 300+ people. Since I am fresh out of elementary school and only 5 months in to my PLP education, the 2018 winter exhibition was my first.
The project my class was assigned has a basis relating to worldview, a basis also stated in the projects driving question. “how is religious worldview represented in the real world?” The assignment was to answer that question though different methods of understanding, i.e. photos, digital poster, photo documentary, food, activities, and more. My group, ( Anders, Emily M, Thomas, and Emily S ) accomplished this and excelled past our original expectations!
FIELD STUDIES
As a class we have gone on a total of 5 field studies in the past semester. They were; Pound & Grain, Oregon, and the three religious field schools that helped us gather information and understanding of the religious worldviews of the six largest world religions. We went to several different places of worship and experienced different aspects of those religions. When we returned, each group was assigned one of the six religions to study. My group was assigned Judaism.
POSTER
One of the largest components for the presentation was the digital posters each group had to create in order to represent the seven aspects of worldview. What are the seven aspects? Simple. The seven aspects are the things that shape an individual’s or society’s worldview. In our posters we had to represent them through different parts of the religion given. Over the course of two weeks, my group started out with a steep drop to the bottom and and even steeper climb up. The slideshow below shows our progress throughout drafts.
In the beginning for any of our drafts we were instructed to make a wire frame which was a basic idea of how our poster was going to look
The final draft was one of the most successful at the exhibition and helped to show us how the progress might not be pretty and may be a little rocky at the start, but it’s worth it for the fantastic final product shown below!
PHOTO DOCUMENTARY
One of the other large parts to the project, one from the maker side of thing was our individual photo documentaries. You might be asking yourself, what is a photo documentary? It’s basically a series of photos lined up in a video in order to answer a question, prove a point, or in our case, show yet again our understandings of the seven aspects of worldview.
( click below for mine! )
https://youtu.be/ab7Er2yvHXA
STATIONS
The PLP winter exhibitions is set up like a museum or an art gallery if you will. Each grade has a section of the school that they fully set up and treat like their territory. Within these areas are our stations. Each group set up tables and and decorated according to their religion or preference. My group did an amazing job with the station. We decorated with blue and black to keep it simple and make it pop in a room full of other stations. We hung an origami Star of David above the station for an aesthetic appeal and of course had and activity and food to go with. Since the exhibition was at the time of Hanukkah, a well recognized Jewish holiday, we played a small, ongoing game of dreidel with visitors and gave chocolate coins ( gelt ) as a reward. Our food component is something I’m oddly proud of. We decided to keep it simple so we made cheese dreidels which I have to admit, were the star of our station!
In the end I can reflect on the things that went great and give myself the credit I deserve and again reflect but on the side of things I could’ve improved on in the moment. Things like drafts aren’t something I’m going to get hung up on but the way I work co-dependently with some people needs some work.
Overall I think I did a really good job with this project. I believe there is always room for improvement with pretty much anything and that improvement comes with effort. I honestly can’t wait for the spring 2019 exhibition because, and I quote, “failure is just the first attempt at learning…” That’s not me saying that my first exhibition was a fail but I am striving for improvement.
See you later ( new post coming soon! )
Ciara ✌️
