Crossing the Atlantic: Post #3

This is the third post of four that will be published here about European immigration and the enduring understandings that dictated the roles of people, places and power within this event. The previous blog posts were very similar, the first summarizing the key terms that were found to help define just what European immigration was, who were involved and how they lived. After these posts were written, I was able to join a small group of other students and compare and contrast the key terms and enduring understanding s that each of us found to define the event of European immigration. I was astonished at how my group was able to expand on my previous knowledge and build an even stronger foundation of key terms and understandings to help guide the group on its way to the final product. One such way our helped to expand on my knowledge of the topic was to find the best enduring understandings from our group as a whole, and expand off of those understandings. I personally thought my previous understandings were a little weak, but our group was able to adapt and add stronger ones that further expanded on European immigration, such as adding the understanding that "People in power tend to be threatened by competition from outsiders, and thus take steps to limit the potential power of those underneath them." This one understanding is able to incorporate both people and power in an easy to research understanding that still applies to the world we live in today. We also had the idea to help organize and expand our knowledge of the key terms by grouping them by when those specific terms most effected immigrants and those around them. Organizing the key terms this way helped our presentation to flow more evenly and allow us seamless transition through each phase of immigration.
Once our group had optimized the research we had previously gathered, we started to put it together in a video that we had been assigned to help spread the information we had found to other students in our class. Simply put, our group was tasked with creating a photo essay, but in the format of a video, which entails a slideshow of pictures is played and each picture has a caption that is read by a member of our group. I was overall very impressed with how seamlessly my group was able to take the information we had gathered previously and compress it into short captions that were able to give large amounts of information in a small frame of time. Each group member was tasked with further research and citing of the original sources, as well as creating the short captions for the video essay. Each person had equal amounts of work to do and our group worked fluidly and there were very few hiccups in the research or writing of the script. The final product is something I feel our entire group can be proud of, it gives interesting and important information about European immigration and the conditions immigrants had to endure in a time frame of only sixty seconds. I don't feel there were any missteps during the group phase and I believe the class will be able to become well-informed on the issues that surrounded Europeans immigration to America, and what people, places and power were able to influence those issues.