Week One Assignment:

This week's exercise is divided into two parts. 

The first part kicks off our weekly reflective writing.  Consonant with the theme of Week Two, we would like for you to reflect upon something related to your experience with re-entry and/or reverse culture shock.  Please select an event (more recent is always better) and, using the outline provided to you in class, do your best to go deeper into what happened, how you were feeling, how others might have been feeling, and what might be different ways of looking at the event.  In this case, the readings for next week should help to inform your reflection, and it will probably be most helpful if you read them all before you start to write. 

Remember that a big part of this exercise is to help encourage you to recognize ‘surprise' moments through reflection so that you can move develop new and foundational ways of approaching life and understanding how the world works.  Put differently, we use reflection to help us to think differently—or in greater depth and complexity—about things that happen in our lives.  Along these lines, you should approach your reflection on the event as something that you ‘explore' what happened, and not in that retrospect you already have ‘figured out'.   All of this may feel slightly uncomfortable at first and you will probably be asking yourself, "Am I doing this right?" but do not fret.  You will be fine!

The second part is not related to the reflective practice outline that was distributed in class.  Here we would like for you to write a brief statement about what you hope to learn from this class.  Based on what you know about the course objectives and general course outline, what do you hope to achieve?  This writing will be valuable for you to reflect upon toward the end of the quarter and we may ask you to revisit it in an exercise. 

Please try to keep this total submission to less than 4 pages (3 for Part one and 1 for Part Two).

Please let us know if you have any questions and early submissions are always appreciated!