William Morrison

Historian Reflection

As a freshman at Hendricken, our history course World Cultures was only one semester.
We learned about Chinese dynasties, Hindu Culture, Islam, and about those who were known as
peacemakers among history. I ended the year with a score of 75%. Sadly I have no artifacts to
show from my experience. So instead in this I have provided two sophomore artifacts.
The first is my socratic seminar on the Occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973. Now first
off, a socratic seminar is a group discussion that helps to share out what we know about a subject
and to gather what others know in a civil, organized way in order to answer a question
collaboratively. The guidelines are simple; respect what others have to say, speak loud and clear,
listen, refer to the text, dont put others down, and ask questions. We had six groups of four
people, each given a role to play out; the discusser, the coach, the assessor, and the tracker. The
discussers role is to share out the information, as well as speaking for the group and asking other
people questions. The coach provided notes to the discusser and made sure that the discusser is
talking for the group. The assessor graded the discusser, listing what they did right and what
could be improved upon. And lastly, the tracker would record the discussion. Every round was
ten minutes, and every time the ten minutes were up, we would go over the topics with our group
and switch up the positions, to keep it different every time.

I ended up doing well during this assessment. I got a 3 and learned many different things
out of this discussion. The most important being that, this is a way of solving a problem while
not debating and arguing over an issue, but you are just sharing what you learned about a topic
with people who are doing the same thing.

The next assignment is also a hands-on assessment where we reenacted colonial

mercantilism. We were partnered up with another person representing a colony as well as one
group being Britain, and one as France. . Depending on what colony you were in was the raw
materials you produced and traded. For example, If you were Massachusetts, you as well as the
other New England Colonies produced fish and maple sugar, and If you were say Georgia, you
and the southern colonies produced tobacco and cotton. The goal was to trade and get foreign
raw materials not native to your colony and/or manufactured goods from Britain. Britains goal

was different, their goal was to collect specie .(money) which colonists obtain from trading with
France, or by taking their foreign raw material and splitting in two. Each tradable item is worth
points; native raw materials were worth nothing to you, foreign raw materials were worth two
points, specie is worth one point, and manufactured goods are worth 4 points. Your goal is to try
to get the most points. Every round added a new factor or fate to your trading rather it be positive
or negative. It could even make you deduct points. But you wanted to play your cards right and
end up with taking more than the worth of what you're given. The simulation taught me that there
is no such thing as fair and that the odds never go the way you may think they are going to.