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WTCMExamples

Some Project Ideas from Past Terms

Horseback Riding Teacher Training: Another good topic from last term was a student who had ridden horses all her life and so had received and given a lot of riding lessons. She wanted to do hers on the lessons for beginning riders.

Now having done this and been involved, she knew what typical "new-bies" were like--afraid of the horses, and not knowing what would spook the horse, etc. So she had a good audience concept, what the "problems" were, and some ways to try to reach the audience and deal with the problems.

A key thing to realise is that her project for class wasn't about horseback riding per se, but about how beginner horseback riding lessons need to be designed for those beginners. So it did end up have to explain some stuff about horseback riding so we could understand the situation, but the presentation wasn't just about riding--it was about how/why the beginner lesson needed to be designed the way it was.

Michigan Humane Society (MHS)--another example that took some talking through--a student started out wanting to just "give" a presentation to us about the MHS. But through discussion we shifted it to being a presentation trying to recruit foster parent volunteers for MHS. The student had done a little foster parenting, and so had experience both being one, but also being new to it and needing to have it all explained. So the roles of audience and presenter were still relatively fresh, and what things had to be learned, *against 'normal' assumptions*, hadn't been forgotten yet. When you think about this, the MHS needs people to do this work, but they need to do some educating about what the work is, and also training about how people actually have to qualify to adopt animals, how to give basic pet raising training--once it got going, she realised how much there was there.

French for Elementary Kids: In high school, I took a french class and part of the requirement was to spend half of a semester teaching 3rd graders french. For my project, I am going to go over the different techniques I had to use to teach the kids basic french, such as number, colors, foods, and different phrases.