Note: We will NOT be doing this one this semester.
What you submit for this assignment consists of TWO parts: your story and your reflection on the story.
For this assignment, you will reflect on your privilege and marginalization. You will do this by free-writing a story about privilege and/or marginalization. You will then share your story with a partner and try to gain more insight into your experiences with privilege and marginalization and how these experiences have shaped you. You will then write up a short reflection on what you explored and the insights you have gained.
Close your eyes and sit quietly with yourself. Think back on your life and try to identify incidents/stories from your life in which you experienced privilege and marginalization. Make a list and then select one experience with privilege and/or with marginalization (note: it could be a story in which the two overlap or are in conflict).
Free-write the story -- don't worry about organization or grammar etc. Try to describe the story, how privilege and/or marginalization figured into the story, how you felt, and any initial insights you have about how that has shaped you.
Tell your story to a partner -- including what happened, how you felt, insights into marginalization and privilege.
Then engage in a discussion with your partner to try to understand more about what was happening, how to make sense of it, what its significance might be to your identity, how you could respond to such a situation in future, something you could have done differently, how you might address this marginalization and privilege for social change, etc. In particular, try to consider how your insights might help you to promote social justice (i.e. reduce marginalization and privilege) in the world around you. From this discussion, you should come away with one or two important insights about privilege and marginalization. Consider using these questions to help you in that discussion:
Reflect on who, where and/or when in the story you wrote:
How did the who, where, and/or when play a role in your marginalization/privilege?
What implications did this experience have on your identity?
How could you promote social justice in relation to the issues you have focused on in your story?
Based on your discussion with your partner, in the same document you free-wrote your story in, add in the most significant insights you gained through the discussion, related to who you are and how you could be the change. This can be a paragraph at the end of the story. Note: this paragraph is the most important part of the assignment.
See my example if you find it helpful.