Day 2:

This blog post will be focusing on Day 2 of Mosaic, this session started a bit late at night – 10:30, and went up until 12:30! Although I was a bit worried about it being a school day the next day, I pulled through with the times and attended the second (and last) day of Mosaic. Today we had quite a few more students from Mount Holyoke College and a few other social justice spokespeople. The first thing we did was reflect on what we took away from the last session, things that surprised us, etc and share it with the rest of the group.

Afterward, we were introduced to the group of students that would be carrying out today’s call – they were all super interesting and provided me with a lot of insight into university life outside of simply the books.

Then we did an exercise based on our names – the origins, pronunciation, meaning, what it means in relation to our identity, etc. I was partnered with a girl called Mariam for this activity, and the two of us shared a lot about our identities and bonded over our shared consistent issue of most people always mispronouncing our name. I think as a result of this I realized that I actually have a lot of mental and emotional connections to my name, and I should definitely start correcting peoples’ pronunciation of my name more instead of simply giving up. It was super fun talking with Mariam and I’m glad that I had them as my partner. Then, we came back to the main session and talked about social identities and the different aspects, we pondered quite a bit on how this would relate to our names.

After a mini-presentation we were put into breakout rooms with partners a few more times, further discussion prompts that were given and relating them to social identity and global/ social issues on a larger scale. I was able to connect with a lot more people that have experienced similar issues with being stereotyped based on names and other mispronunciation issues. It was highly enlightening and fun to talk to a lot of people from different parts of the world with different identities and issues. After gathering back in the main session, and reflecting a bit – it marked the end of the Mosaic workshop.

I think that in the end, I was able to gain quite a lot from this workshop – I was able to engage with a lot of really cool individuals that had similar passions to me (especially in relation to global issues and social justice work). I hope that I come across a workshop as diverse and enjoyable as this one sometime soon!

Learning outcomes:

• LO5 – Working collaboratively with others
  • I think that this session I was able to engage a lot more directly with others, there was a lot of communication going on within the breakout rooms – as the exercises depended mainly on conversing with the other person and sharing your thoughts.
  • I believe that I successfully discussed with my partner and was able to effectively share my thoughts and opinions while listening when someone else was talking. 
  • The flow of the conversation did not stall during these breakout rooms, which left me feeling very content as we got through many of the conversation prompts and were able to successfully relate things on both a personal and global scale.        

• LO6 – Global engagement
  • After discussing our personal thoughts the exercises that were conducted focused quite a lot on relating these things to global/ social issues and how we may be able to overcome these.
  • I think that I was able to cognize during this part of the exercise very well, it really broadened my perspective on certain global issues.
  • I successfully thought of certain issues that myself and other people would have faced in relation to identity, and potential solutions for these.