Professionalism
I began this apprenticeship with the intention to further my competency in the career readiness skill of professionalism. Working with a professor as a research assistant allowed me to improve my research skills and achieve an understanding of how scholarly inquiry works in an academic setting. I kept up with this by keeping my evidence organized and holding myself accountable to further my research findings before each of our meetings.
Technology
With my research, I was able to help compile evidence to investigate this question, which was sourced from articles and studies from scholarly research databases, international newspaper archives, and archived press clippings and magazines. This connects to building my proficiency in the technology competency. Before this apprenticeship, I was not familiar with archival work. Now, I have achieved a familiarity with how to effectively search archival databases to get the results I need. I primarily used JSTOR, the Irish Newspaper Archives, the Abbey Theatre Archive, the Irish Times archive, and the Northwestern Libraries Digital collection.
Critical Thinking
Given all of this evidence, it’s easy to see that this is a nuanced subject, and therefore, I believe this project helped me to grow the most within the critical thinking competency. As I mentioned, there is not much information on the intersection between The Emperor Jones, ancient Irish traditions, and Black and Irish stereotypes. I had to make careful decisions and draw from background knowledge to decide which writings or pieces of evidence could meaningfully connect to the argument.