HIS3AAH Aboriginal Australian History - Reflective Essay Assignment Help

Step one: Attend an Indigenous-run event taking place as part of National Reconciliation Week 2022 (May 27 - June 3).

You will attend Reconciliation Week event instead of your week 12 tutorial. The event can be either online or in person. There will be options detailed in a document placed on LMS by the end of week eleven. You may also identify and attend an event not detailed in the document in consultation with your tutor. If there are personal, health or carer reasons why you cannot attend an event, please email Kat by 27 May for an alternative assignment.

Step Two: Write a Reflective Essay

Now consider how this experience speaks to some of the key ideas raised throughout this course – this might be colonisation, decolonisation, possession, violence, resistance, assimilation policies, activism, the importance of place, continuity of culture, mobility, imperial literacy, the issue of non- Indigenous people writing Indigenous history etc.

You should also reflect on how your subject position (e.g., your background or experiences) impacts on how you have experienced both this event, and your learning in HIS3AAH in general.

You should write a 1500 word reflective essay which discusses:

1. the event you attended you participated in
2. your subject position and what you have learned this semester
3. how what you have learned in HIS3AAH informed your understanding of the event
4. three of the weeks of learning in HIS3AAH, including specific mention of at least six of the set

In this task, we are interested in your thought processes, and how you have engaged with HIS3AAH overall.

A quality response to this task will thread the three separate components (the place, reflection on your subject position, and reflection on at least three key weeks of HIS3AAH) throughout the piece of writing

Format:

Reflective essays are designed to elicit your informed responses to the course. They offer a broader canvas than research essays and you are encouraged to make connections across different topics/week.

As well as providing an answer to the question, you should demonstrate sustained engagement with course content.

You do not need to do extra research for this essay. You should answer the question and support your arguments using the course materials: weekly readings, lectures and tutorials. You may do extra research if you wish (and we will reward you for it), but it is more important to demonstrate to your reader the work you have done over the semester by drawing thoroughly on the course content.

This is not a formal research essay, so the stringent rules regarding formal prose and citation do not necessarily apply. You may (indeed you are encouraged to) write in the first person. You do need to clearly indicate the sources which you are referring to in footnotes, and list them in a bibliography (which is not included in the word count). If you refer to an item, artwork of specific location, please also identify this in your footnotes. You should use the Oxford (footnoting) system.

You may include photographs, but please ask permission of the event managers/tour leader BEFORE you take them and be respectful of their instructions.

Submission:

Submit as a double-spaced word file via Turnitin link on LMS.

What is a ‘reflective essay’?

Reflective essays are academic essays just like research essays. What makes a reflective essay "good" is the same as for other kinds of essays: well-written prose, well-supported arguments, clear arguments, good structure and interesting ideas. What is different about a reflective essay is that the essay is about you and your thinking. However, CRUCIALLY you need evidence from your course to back up your reflections. So a reflective essay is also a chance to demonstrate all the work you have done over the semester. It is your chance to show us your ‘engagement’ with the course – all the lectures you listened to, tutorials you participated in, and the reading and thinking that you did. If you think of a research essay as a "vertical" axis (delving quite deeply into a quite narrow field of inquiry), then the reflective essay works on a more "horizontal" axis, attempting to range quite broadly over the whole course.

What is meant by “subject position”?

Your subject position relates to your position, as a learner in this subject. In reflecting on your subject position, you are invited to think about how where you come from, your background and/or experiences, have affected the way you understood and learned in this subject. For example;

• a computer science major is going to have a very different experience of this subject to someone who has only studied in humanities/liberal arts
• An international student is going to have different insights into Australian culture, and its status as a settler colonial society, to a domestic student.
• Someone who identifies as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person, or has Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander ancestors, will have a different experience of the course to someone from a non-Indigenous

That said, you should not feel under obligation to share anything that you’re not comfortable with. The main thing here is to reflect on how who you are impacts on how you respond to the event that you attended and to HIS3AAH.

Grading information:

Your work will be evaluated on:

• engagement with the themes of the unit and its conceptual frameworks;
• engagement with and use of the unit materials (and their referencing and bibliography);
• ability to make links across and between topics we have covered;
• expression of your subject position and its integration into discussion;
• the clarity and eloquence of your expression.