I took this class to go along with my study abroad to South Africa. While the trip was over winter break, we had to meet three times during the semester to do some course work.
For our final project, we had to create a travel magazine aimed for kids who were traveling around the world to learn about South Africa. This assignment taught me to look at the trip from a different perspective, since we took our experiences from our study abroad in real life and wrote them in the perspective of a child living in South Africa for the magazine. For example, in the document below, I wrote about my experience going to Rachel’s house for lunch. The top paragraph is my perspective as a real life college student from America eating a traditional South African meal. This was for the Facebook posts that we made each day to update our family and friends. The bottom post was how I turned the experience into the perspective of a child who lives in South Africa. This was the article that went in our travel magazine. To do this, I had to put myself in their shoes and pretend like I live that life everyday. I had to think about all aspects of the character I was writing for, including how old they were, their social status, their financial standing, etc. It was different because with my normal writing, I just write how I speak. For the assignment, every sentence I wrote had to match the character of the child I was writing for. This assignment helped me to look at my trip from a different perspective and keep in mind the different lifestyles that people live.