Guía de Supervivencia
Survival Guide
Reflection
For the Guia de Supervivencia project, we created a survival guide about a country of our choice with a group. My group and I chose to write our survival guide on Mexico. The pages were written in both English and Spanish and the subjects ranged anywhere from shopping to a zombie apocalypse. We started the project by researching specific aspects of the country such as driving or useful language and then formatted it into the final presentation. Another element of this project was creating a culture-relevant skit. My group decided to focus on the Mexican drug cartel. In the hopes of not offending anybody in the audience, we made sure to note that interactions with the Mexican drug cartel is very low, and that there was not cultural bigotry occuring.
I have been to Mexico many times, but during my research I learned that traditional Mexican dancing came from the Spanish conquest of the Aztec. The traditional folk dancing expresses religion through vibrant colors and unique music rhythm. I like that religion is such an important factor of the culture, and that dance is one of the many ways that they express that.
Something that I really liked about this project was that it allowed us to control what we wanted to learn. Granted, there were the guidelines of things that must be included, but we were able to mold the project to our interest's. Another valuable part of the project was speaking Spanish in front of an audience. Doing the skits required us to gather a solid understanding of pronunciation and begin to memorize the lines. A live audience adds a particular type of pressure to take the speaking in a more serious manner, so it provided a good opportunity to zero in on speaking the Spanish language.
I have been to Mexico many times, but during my research I learned that traditional Mexican dancing came from the Spanish conquest of the Aztec. The traditional folk dancing expresses religion through vibrant colors and unique music rhythm. I like that religion is such an important factor of the culture, and that dance is one of the many ways that they express that.
Something that I really liked about this project was that it allowed us to control what we wanted to learn. Granted, there were the guidelines of things that must be included, but we were able to mold the project to our interest's. Another valuable part of the project was speaking Spanish in front of an audience. Doing the skits required us to gather a solid understanding of pronunciation and begin to memorize the lines. A live audience adds a particular type of pressure to take the speaking in a more serious manner, so it provided a good opportunity to zero in on speaking the Spanish language.