reflection essay paper

In class this semester, you worked with and interacted among individuals of different racial, ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds by doing group work assignments and building bridges activities. You are now asked to write a (“reflection essay.”)  Before you begin writing, first spend time thinking deeply about race and diversity in your life.  This assignment requires that you place a critical lens on your thoughts and behavior. ( 2 pages long )

·      Please briefly describe each of your three Building Bridges activities that you did with your partner(s). This is a short paragraph. Please do not write more that two sentences describing each activity. If I need to hear more about the activity I will ask you about the activities in class.  You must devote ninety percent of your paper (one and a half pages) to reflecting on what these experiences (the three activities that you did with diverse partner(s)) have taught you about diversity or lack of diversity in your life. You are asked to reflect on diversity in your home-life, community-life, and campus-life.

You are encouraged to write about:

·      Your perceptions, experiences, and feelings.

·      Personalize your own experiences of comfortableness with individuals from different groups when doing the building bridges activities and how it relates to your daily social interactions on campus and in the community where you grew-up.

·      Personalize and relate to what you got out of doing the three activities to your own experiences and understandings of the following race diversity reading/discussion topics:

·       Privilege,

·      Discrimination,

·      Prejudice, and

·      Empathy (if you weren’t in class when this video was shown, see the demonstration of empathy by two people in the following Youtube video that we viewed and discussed in class: Undercover Boss Modell's Sporting Goods (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jadl9usH3s) Go to:25:50 - 30:46 and then to 38:45-40:43.

building bridges activity 1 : we went out for a lunch and talked about our ethnic backrounds, race and whether the places where we grew up divered or not. 

activity 2 : we went out on temple campus and made interviews with people and we asked them about race and diversity in temple university. 

activity 3: we went out for dinner in one of the halal restaurants to experince new culture.