This has been the most interesting semester of my educational career, and believe it or not, has made me more excited about the way I feel my college years are going to go. Part of this, actually, is thanks to you. I’m grateful for the way that you have worked with me through my sickness and have helped me so I wouldn’t have to withdraw from your class. Thank you so much. With that being said, let’s get to the reflection of the assignments throughout the semester.
On the bright side, I was able to come to class during the majority of the prewriting, drafting, and revision process. I think the strength of my process was picking a topic that I was excited about. I felt as if I had an advantage as well, since my topic is related to my major, special education. I had already had some research behind my belt since I had to review classroom techniques and inclusion for my Introduction to Education for Exceptional Children class. I felt I was able to communicate my ideas well through my project pitch, and I felt I was able to get a clear vision of what I wanted to convey through the outline.
On my blog, I mentioned this in the commentary of my annotated bibliography, but finding outside research online or in the library was a lot harder than I thought it would be. Inclusion is surprisingly new to the education world, and finding research that supported the methods of inclusion through statistics and experimental sciences was not an easy search. Even worse, I had to present the information I found, or the lack thereof. During my annotated bibliography presentation, I often struggled to find words to present repetitive information in a new way in order to keep my documentary subject interesting and fresh. I am also not the best public speaker, so I probably did not do well with finding words at all.
I mentioned a lot of this in my video on my blog, but if I could, I would love to just retake the entire course. I love documentaries and I was excited about the topic I chose, but when I got sick, making the documentary became harder. One of the side effects of having a vitamin deficiency is confusion, and trying to devise a documentary while not knowing what is going on or not being able to focus in general is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I would often read and reread the same sentence, only to find out later that it was absolutely vague and only made sense if you read it slowly.
I wish I could’ve done more interviews with special education teachers and those in the education department that have their masters or doctorate degree in one area or many areas of special education. As mentioned above, I did not properly account for the lack of information I found about the topic online or in different journals, books, and/or magazines. I was shocked to find that the information I did find was repetitive, and the more it repeated, the less useful it became to my knowledge of the topic and what I could use in the documentary. If I could revise the drafting process, I would go after getting more information from outside, primary sources, rather than cherry picking the information I was handed through Google.
The filming and editing problems that I occurred was the filming. I also addressed this in the video on my blog, but since I was showing signs of illnesses that were highly contagious, the medical advice I received was to not expose myself around people and take my antibiotics in order to recover. I searched for other answers, just to find that I wasn’t contagious at all and that I could’ve filmed for my documentary. I’m struggling a little bit to not be bitter about losing about half of my semester to this vitamin deficiency, but I feel as if I were to do the filming process, I would be set up to film the documentary with ease.
A problem that I ran into with my subject, as mentioned before, is that inclusion is surprisingly new. My parents, my sisters, and even I can remember a time where reacting with students in my school with disabilities was unheard of. Students with special needs would often stay in their own classrooms, which would be at least five hallways away from general education students. In fact, I first came in contact with someone with special needs in the fourth grade, and I’m glad to see that views on including students with special needs are changing so general education students get accustomed to being around others with disabilities and vice versa. With that being said, finding research that supports inclusion was not easy nor fun to find and sort through, and I would have loved to have more quantitative information and more scientific journals to support my topic. I think I coped with this problem by realizing that this documentary could be groundbreaking, and could potentially inspire someone to go after finding why inclusion works well for the education system.
Something that I learned about the documentary process is how much time and strategic planning goes into making a documentary. While finding information and outlining my project, I had to sort through what was necessary for the audience to know without taking away from the material I wanted to present. I love documentaries, and I definitely didn’t think they just turned on their camera and recorded something interesting, but I didn’t take into consideration the amount of time, research, and dedication it takes in order to create a documentary.
Since I now know the amount of time and dedication it takes to do a project like this, I would like to better plan my time in order to film and do more research and get everything that I would like to put into my documentary, like more interviews. Also, I would love to be more familiar with the filming and editing technology. I am not technologically savvy and I would love to know how to film and edit smoothly so I can make a visually effective documentary.
