Reflection / Yay or Nay
When Jogustine choose me to be a participant of Empire to Europe-class I was like “Okay, you gotta do, what you gotta do” having the expectation that it would be a very boring, dry and early class. Now reflecting on the course I can say yes, it was early, however, it never felt boring.
Before the course I had a glimpse idea of the British Empire but as I am not much of an historian my idea of the Empire was very limited. I know that there is a lot more to teach about the Empire and at times it felt that our class discussion could just go on and on and on… Yet, I think the course gave us a nice overview of the most important parts and I do feel a bit more enlightened. The course helped me for example to realize how big the Empire actually was and how in some ways it still has its influences (Of course I also learned a lot about the fall of the Empire ;)). By showing the on-going influences the class did not become a boring historical lesson because we were able to see how it effects our present. Yes, the fact that the brexit or rather the referendum was happening just now was a big benefit and for me also the most interesting topic. Additionally, thumbs-up here for showing us why someone would vote for the brexit (although most if not all of us were clearly against it). Generally, I liked that the teaching of this class was very open-minded and versatile; we got presented different ideas and perspectives via interesting documentaries and texts of why the Empire ended (or why people made certain decisions etc.) encouraging us to get involved with the issue.
As my Studienleistung is the active participation I had to write a blog post every fortnight. Admittedly, I have never been a big fan of blogs — regardless of the topic. By now I don’t really know how I feel about blogs– maybe I don’t hate them as much anymore but I am still not much of a fan of them either. I can see the benefit in them as we got to freely choose a topic and express ourselves. So yes, it was a good task to do, however at times I had no idea about what I should/can write as I simply felt that I did not know that much about the Empire to blog about (Yes, I did some research but I still felt quite insecure about it). After a while you grow used to it and find inspirational facebook posts or newspaper articles etc.. As suggested by others before, maybe the blog post could be used more about our opinions and feelings toward a person/idea/issue that was brought up in class or maybe just to deepen the topic. Thereby a connection between the blog posts and the course would also be created, which I thought was unfortunately missing (Some blog posts were really great and I would have loved a class-discussion about them!).
All in all I liked this course and I would recommend it anytime [So defiantly a yay! :)]! Especially since the next course of this kind (From Empire to Europe to Brexit?) is going to be exciting as it will probably deal with the aftermath of the referendum.
