New Epiphany- Journal 3

The week after we did our oral argument presentations we sat in class and discussed any new pieces to our data or analysis that we'd discovered. At first I couldn't come up with anything and was just talking out of my butt trying to rack my brain for anything. And then as I was telling Dr. Bisha bout the survey results that I'd had so far, I made that realization that most of the responses had a couple of things in common with each other.

I discovered that the commonalities were about consent and drinking among the first year students. I'd made that discovery before and had never thought anything of it until that moment in my conversation with Dr. Bisha. There are many other components to Title IX than just consent and drinking alcohol. In fact, those aren't even the main topics. It's about so much more like sexual harassment, discrimination, and domestic violence. No where in any of the responses did the students say the majority of those things. A few of them talking about consent and sexual harassment, but most people don't even understand that there are so many other parts to Title IX.

I decided that the students didn't grasp these other concepts because they weren't focused on enough. In just about each section, alcohol was involved and the idea of consent. Which is good. But not the bigger picture. And even if the other topics of sexual assault or domestic violence were considered, alcohol is always the underlying factor in all of the scenarios that the online course talks about. If there is repetition, the students will remember it for a short time, but it won't last long enough. Dr. Bisha told me that I should look into articles on memory and repetition and see what scholars say about the idea to add on to my literature review. Which is also good because my lit review is lacking severely.

This epiphany that I got during this class helped spark my interest again. I feel like I was at a stand still in my excitement about my topic but because I finally had somewhere that I was going, it helped me to get excited again and want to do more research and get down to the bottom of why students aren't understanding all of the concepts given to them.