Well, it’s already time to reflect on our learning process…I can’t believe that these months have passed so quickly!
First of all, dealing with the American and Italian political elections helped me learn a lot of things about politics as well as the socio-political situation in both countries. Following the news about the elections and comparing the way it was presented in different online newspapers helped me evaluate critically the quality of the information I came across, and see how difficult it is to find completely impartial information. Moreover, talking with the American peers about this issue made me aware that political leaders not only in Italy but also in America often make a bad use of mass media for their political propaganda, as we saw in the videos of the pd, pdl and that of Obama girl.
Communicating through Skype and taking part in the forum with the American peers helped me reflect on many aspects of my culture and country, such as the Italian political situation and its problems, in particular the phenomenon of immigration. Doing research on it made me aware that political measures towards immigrants are still too restrictive and they don’t enable regular immigrants to fully integrate in our society, for example denying them the right to vote. Moreover, our final wiki project helped me know more about this phenomenon in both countries as well as aroused my curiosity to study it in detail. In particular, analyzing the similarities and differences in both countries, I learned many things about the condition of undocumented immigrant women and what kind of discrimination they still face nowadays (See section "comparison US & Italy" of our wiki page).
As regards my research for the final wiki project, retrieving American documents was not so easy. First of all because Chiara and I had to search for similar documents, as our topics had to be as much parallel as possible. I must say that it was quite difficult to find the same kind of information on the great amount of sites and documents that there are on the Net about immigrant working women. In fact, the majority of the articles I found dealt with specific situations (e.g. about the condition of Hispano-American prostitutes in New York, or about providing housing services in Santa Barbara) and this happened to Chiara as well. This is one of the reasons why we decided to make our topic more general, changing it from “women immigrants and prostitution” to “women immigrants and forms of exploitation”, so that we could compare better the same aspects for both countries.
As far as interactive skills are concerned, during the Skype sessions with Chiara I didn’t feel uncomfortable in asking ‘difficult’ or controversial questions, as she has always proved to be open-minded and ready to explain to us what we want to know about American culture. For example, when we talked about immigration, she told us the difficult situation of poor and undocumented immigrants who cannot have access to medical care and social services.
Talking about misunderstandings, I remember that when we had to decide a common topic for the project each one of us had her own ideas and was determined to keep her own opinion, and it was not easy to come to a compromise. However, talking with each other and bearing in mind to respect each other’s opinions, we eventually managed to come to a solution. Then, I remember that Chiara wanted to talk about abortion, even though we said to her that we found difficulties linking it with our topic “women at work”. Explaining to her our point of view and helping her by giving some suggestions for her research we come to an eventual understanding. Working in group enabled me to always express my opinion, but at the same time to listen to what the others have to say as well as respect it.
As regards language skills, doing research for our tasks and wiki projects, I realized I’ve really improved my reading skills: now I I can select more easily and quickly the information I’m searching for among the wide range of documents that you can find on the Web. Moreover, my writing skills have improved as well: thanks to the various tasks and to peer feedback, I can write more fluently and I find no particular difficulties in adapting my writing to different contexts. Finally, communicating with native speakers through Skype I’ve improved my listening skills and my speaking skills: I've gained more confidence and fluency in the conversation and I learned a lot of new words and expressions as well.
