You miss one hundred percent of the shots that you don't take" (Gretskey, 2008). These words stated by famous athlete, Wayne Gretzky, depict how we shouldn't be afraid to take risks because we are afraid of the outcome of those risks. These words delineate apprehension prior to entering fieldwork experience with the HYPE students these past couple of weeks. I was so apprehensive to work with these students, as these students were very close in age to me, and I was accustomed to working with students in the elementary grades. Like many others, I had no prior experience working with the concept of ethnography, which made me even more anxious prior to entering the HYPE space. However, this HYPE experiences truly provided me with an experience I shall not soon forget. As alluded to above, I am an aspiring educator, and this experience truly allowed me to not only utilize the ethnographic concepts in practice, but truly allowed me to envision and put many of the ideas I have been working with in my education classes into practice. .
The HYPE space consisted of all the students from the cluster classes and the HYPE teens along with Pearl Rosenberg, Lora Taub, Jenna Azar and Tony Dalton, whom of which served as our advisors for the session. HYPE allowed for us to take part in a multitude of activities, all of which strived towards making an effort toward creating a healthy community. Many of these activities included, ice breakers, research on social justice issues and creating multimodal presentations on these social justice issues. .
As mentioned above, I was used to working with students of younger age than these students at HYPE and I arrived at the space with some baggage of ideas and things that I utilized when working with those younger students, after soon realizing that many of those techniques would likely not be applicable to students of the HYPE group. So, I went into this experience thinking I was going to be forced to change so much about myself to try and make this program successful for these teens.