Common Good Project

Reflection:

For the Common Good Project, I worked in a group with two others, and we chose the topic Immigration. We then narrowed our audience down to peers our age (college students) to inform them about the myths, facts, and other general information that is good to know about immigration. On our website, it was important for us to tackle the main points of “the myths, the facts, and why it matters.” We thought it was important to show our audience the myths about immigration and why we should not believe everything we hear. Then we gave information (the facts) to prove those myths and explain a little more into detail about each one. Lastly, for the reason of why it matters is because even if it does not effect us personally it effects the environment around us whether we see it or not. We also had to create a brochure, and we believed it was important for our audience, to know what immigration and illegal immigration is. What the United States is doing to help these immigrants (The DREAM Act of 2017) but also how it affects us personally. We also conducted interviews with some friends on the Longwood campus to see what they personally thought about immigrants which I believe was very informative. Lastly, we included how students could get involved in the Farmville community in our brochure.

As a group we came up with 10 different course concepts and rhetorical strategies to not only integrate throughout our website and brochure but also help us get our point across to our audience. Here is three out of the ten we selected:

Posthumanist Theory of Agency:
1. “the choices an individual makes are circumscribed by a variety of factors, ranging from socioeconomic conditions, to language constraints, to the people with whom the individuals are interacting (pg. 11)”. This concept relates to the opinions people make due to influence which is most commonly how young people form their beliefs. Whether it is from their parents or peers, young people often make assumptions based on what they are exposed to constricting their ability to form opinions for themselves. This concept is often difficult to change for rhetors as it is out of their control and often difficult to change.
Pathos:
1. “that which leads the audience “to feel emotion” (pg. 15)”. We chose the appeal to pathos as we felt it would be most crucial in representing the importance of understanding the real facts about immigration. There are many heartbreaking stories of immigrants coming to this country on nothing in order to create a better life for them and their families which appeals directly to pathos and supports our purpose. We chose to include real life stories of immigrants to reflect the common misconceptions about immigration.
Identity:
1. “refers to the physical and/or behavioral attributes that make a person recognizable as a member of a group (pg. 169)”. Identity essentially is the ingredients of a person and what makes them who they are. From race, gender, class level, religion, and others, there are many different characterizations hat people contribute to their identity. Our project highlights the amount of different identities in ur society and encourages the diversity in America.

The Common Good Project achieved our course outcome, “understand the nature of public discourse/debate as determined by purpose, audience, and context” because we had to understand the nature of immigration. We had to show the purpose on why we chose this topic. Which lead to us searching for context to create our website, brochure, and rationale statement.

https://mchammaz88.wixsite.com/immigrationandyou