I really enjoyed taking the class Race and Gender in the Media. As future media professionals, I definitely find it very important for all of us to address the controversial topics that were very often brought up through our weekly class discussions. I think that as the future opens up each and every day, we will without a doubt be presented with tough situations that deal with race and gender. Although it might not always be with our future careers as media professionals, I do believe we will face these problems and need to know how to properly behave in the situations. Also, I think it is really beneficial for us to be aware of all the issues around us when it comes to race and gender so we can be better prepared to prevent these situations from occurring again.As for me, I definitely do believe that I grew a lot as an individual through the discussions we had each and every week. Coming into the class, I was very unaware of the other minorities around myself. I do sort of believe that I might have grown up in a bit of a bubble. Although I grew up in a very racially diverse town and high school, I do strongly believe that each race was portrayed in a more “white” way then as the extremely culturally different ways as we have been exposed to in this class. I think the discussions we had, as controversial as they were and no matter how silent I remained, did open up my eyes to the issues I had never really been aware of or exactly exposed to before in my past times growing up. However, I will say, as controversial as many of our classmates and you might believe it, that sometimes we were arguing in class for the sake of arguing over a topic rather than the issue at hand.
As for the structure of the class, I do believe we would have had much more open and successful communication had the class been two days a week rather than just one. I know you had so much you wanted to teach us and so many topics you would have liked to bring up in class discussions, but there was simply not enough time for you to do so. I also think sometimes since so much was being attempted to fit into our short time together each week words got lost in translation. Perhaps this is why there were so many changes to the syllabus and to projects in general. I wish we could have had a more open schedule to address these topics and have the chance to get your opinion and the opinions of the rest of our class out on the table in a discussion.
I strongly believe that one way we could have overcome the main problem of lack of time was to cut back the amount of group presentations. I think we all were originally under the impression that both of our two presentations had to last a half hour each that we prepared that much information for the presentations. However, when it comes down to it no one was able to keep it in that time frame due to all the discussions. Do not get me wrong, I loved each presentation and found them so interesting, but it just took up so much class time each week. I think if maybe we were limited to just one presentation we could have had more time to bring up other topics.
Again, thank you so much for an excellent semester and interesting class.
