This was a student-led event organised in collaboration with our Language teachers team to make us understand the concept of language in the cultural context. The theme for this event was a royal wedding, where our entire grade was divided into 7 teams which were assigned to 7 different countries like – India, Middle East, Europe, etc. And we had to take any royal family of the country and use our knowledge and connect it to language in the cultural context. My group was assigned the Middle East and the royal family that we selected was the Prince Rashid bin Hassan who was from Jordan. The creative aspect in CAS is covered in this activity as we had to create our text types (I was in charge of decorating team where I made that posters on different social media and also presenting my research in front of people. How language played a role I that also its analysis that was required).
Learning Outcome 1 – Identify own strength and develop areas for growth
It is very important to identify our strengths and weaknesses before selecting things to be done and making any decision in the group. My strength in the group was that I was creative enough to make and decorate our room and also my research were applying to the people out there. Hence I decided and requested my teammates that I should go along with my strengths however, there were people who were willing to give me the task of communicating things to the people, which was my weakness. It soon became an argument and out team leader came up with a solution of identifying all our strengths and weaknesses and dividing our roles according to them. After the discussion, I decided to work upon my weakness as well hence i asked my group leader to give me role of presenting the information in front of people from which my communication skills would have developed. And turning weakness into strength would help to do more work enthusiastically.
Learning Outcome 2 – Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.
We faced few challenges across the event. Undertaking the challenges is important, because we get to develop problem solving skills. The first problem that we faced was dividing our work accordingly to the skills that we possess. However people wanted to do the most easy work, which wasn’t the way how a group should have work. Therefore after we faced conflicts with our team mates or team leader we came up with a solution to divide. Other conflict that we faced was less material that we had while decorating and neither of the groups were giving us the resources that we wanted….we started to panic as we were already running out of time. But being panic wouldn’t have resolved our problem at the very last minute we rushed to the stores of our school…and got few resources from which we could decorated our room. Through such challenges I got to learn and develop few things like problem solving skills and time management.
Learning Outcome 5 – Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.
Working in a group for me was possible to handle, continuous disputes makes less coordination among team mates and results in less productive work. However working in a group also has some benefits. It helps to come up with better decisions when more than one mind is put into work, we can share different skills and can divide our work which results in less burden to everyone. In our group, though we had many conflicts, but we were able to find a possible solution for it as well. Few challenges that we faced as discussed above. Working in a team has many benefits blends complementary strengths among teammates.
Learning Outcome 6 – Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance
It is important to know about different culture, religion, background and countries and how they connects with language and literature. Language as english is most spoken language in the world. Through this event it helped to spread information about different culture and their wedding practices that they followed. Also it helped people to know about how language and literature has evolved around the world and connects with culture of different world and
Learning Outcome 7 – Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions
Working ethically is very important in an event. We were required to make our own decorations and do not copy it from others, we were required to present correct information to the viewers since there were topics that were new to people. Hence passing wrong knowledge wouldn’t have been ethical. Therefore in our groups we made sure that the knowledge and information that we take are from trusted sources and not fake. We used to check our information and get it recheck from our supervisors so that we don’t present wrong information. Since I was in decorating, I made sure that my idea was creative and not copied from somewhere.
Hence to conclude this event helped me change my weaknesses into strengths and helped me to develop different skills. It even gave me understanding about different cultures of the world and how language can be a powerful tool to convey a message. Our commitment and hard work paid off when we were voted the third best team of our grade. I was very happy with our hard work that gave us these results.
A glimpse to the Whakanui event :-
