11th Grade History

Corbin Williams

Virginia Convention Constitution Assignment

February 07 (3rd Quarter/2020)

Prof. Robyn

Junior Year - American Politics - Recognize Perspectives - Explains how perspectives influence human interactions and understandings of a situation, event, issue, or phenomenon.

The artifact that I have selected for my junior year history reflection is a written assignment that we had to do, which Professor Robyn calls a blog. This blog required us to take a hypothetical but realistic situation from the United States Constitutional Convention and try to defend a specific position relating to the ratification of the constitution. The ISSN domain that I strongly feel fits best with this artifact is “Recognize Perspectives.” The point of this assignment was not only to gain an understanding of what was in the constitution and how it was ratified, but we also needed to jump into the shoes of a delegate from Virginia. We needed to recognize his perspective and the situation that he was in in order to make a strong and informed argument about why the constitution should be ratified. We also needed to read an article, which we would use as support, that explained why a strong national government would be beneficial during that time, meaning that we had to understand the author’s perspective as well so that we could use it as support and apply it to the historical situation.

The instructions for the assignment given to us by Professor Robyn was to write a response to the prompt that he had given us in three to five well-supported paragraphs while using the article he provided, along with additional sources that we could find on our own, as support. The prompt told us to imagine that we were a delegate from Virginia during the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and an infectious disease, known as Convid 1 was spreading across the nation. Somebody raises up during a town hall in Richmond claiming that the state governments would be better off holding a majority of the power, with the pandemic being an example of that. It was our job to create a strong argument to refute that statement by claiming that the federal government would be better off handling matters such as a pandemic, which is a main reason for the ratification of the constitution in Virginia. I ended up writing a five paragraph paper along with a reference page to complete the assignment.

The completion of this assignment demonstrates global competency because I was able to analyze a real-world topic that is constantly debated and changing, in this case state vs. federal power, and I was able to learn about it and understand different viewpoints that supported each side of the argument. I was also able to take information about that issue that was written in present day, which in this case were the articles that were provided and the ones that I found on my own, and I applied them to a realistic historical situation that is based on a major event in our nation’s history that occurred almost 250 years ago. I feel that being able to apply these concepts that are still present today to an event that happened hundreds of years ago can be a very important skill. I feel the same way about the ability to recognize the perspectives of others, which I did a lot throughout this paper, and it has helped me become a better global citizen.