Reflection on Group Work: Fortunate Travelers!

At the beginning of our Journey in Literature class, we were assigned to work in a group. At first, I was hoping the professor let us chose the people we wanted to work with because I knew two people before we took this class, but the professor selected the groups we would have to work during the whole semester. The first day we had to work in the group we were really a bunch of strangers. We didn't know each other. That first approach was very formal. We told each other our names, we share our phone numbers and emails, and we also create a group message in Whatsapp to establish contact more easily. During this class, we also divide our roles in the group and selected a group name: Fortunate Travelers. Valeria and Liane were the note takers, Héctor and Antonio worked as the researchers, Manuel was the conflict solver and I act as the task manager of the group.

Meeting new people can be an interesting and enriching experience or an awful one. Since we did not know each other, I think we were very timid those first days of class. As time progressed, we started talking to each other more than the beginning of the course and we felt more comfortable sharing our thoughts and discussing our opinions. We are very different, but agree with a group opinion was never a big trouble for us. The first group project we had to present in front of class was about Jamaica Kincaid's novel "A Small Place". We search for information about the author, we looked out for quotes that supported our point of view, and  we wrote about the different themes on the reading. Finally, we made our oral presentation and we felt comfortable with it. Unfortunately, we did not felt very happy with the grade we received  from its analysis and I believe this experience helped us to join more as a group and worked more than we were already working to obtain a good grade in the next group project.

This is the poster we made for the oral
 presentation about Carl Jung's travel to North Africa.

The final oral presentation about Carl Jung is the highlight of our group work. We had the same purpose: obtain a better grade. We took it very seriously and we search for information about the author and quotes that support our argument. We decided to meet up during the weekend to make sure we do a great presentation. During the meeting, we finished our analysis on the different themes such as othering, in-group, out-group, location, identity, and perspective, and we also had the opportunity to prepare a poster to explain better the location theme. This experience helped us to grow as a group and know more about each other. We shared our opinions and we respected each other.

It has been an honor to work with you, guys! We all worked hard and I'm thankful with all of you. I had told meeting new people can be an interesting and enriching experience or an awful one. Well, the last thing I had to say is that meeting Valeria, Liane, Hector, Antonio and Manuel was an interesting and enriching experience! I had learned that group work are not always bad. We can gain a lot of knowledge from many of them.

Benefits of group work