Reflection

My background is in public health and in the field we focus on health issues, disparities, data, and how to create interventions to help people. Unfortunately, a lot of the times we forget the people behind the numbers. As a public health practitioner I desire to humanize the people we are passionate about helping and the only way to do so is to share their stories, experiences, belief systems and truly get to know one another well in order to truly create services and programs with them and for them.

However I’ve struggled with executing this dream because in the past I experienced many traumas which caused me to suffer from PTSD as a result. While I am in a better place now, a left over remnant of the PTSD is my desire to make myself small and mediocre and not stand out in an effort to keep myself safe. If I am nobody then nobody can hurt me was my core believe. This unfortunately has stunted me in many ways including my ability to share my voice, ideas. However, in this course as I was creating the projects I felt myself breaking out of that shell. To be a creative you have to bleed some of yourself into your work. As I created projects around some of my passions it felt less scary to voice these thoughts and ideas and I felt myself becoming empowered by my own voice. I hope with this new found confidence in my ability to use and create narrative I will apply it to the public health field specifically in terms of scaling up therapy from an individual intervention to a public health intervention.

The learning theories were extremely important because it really showed me that there are educational theories behind using narrative and digital tools to execute those stories. In my experience in public health so far, the experts in the field tend to think that digital tools to educate people are nice but not very effective. They tend to find more credibility in research and heavy science that takes years to implement in the world and remain theories a lot of times. The learning theories in narrative and utilizing digital services to execute them has bolstered my confidence in sharing these types of projects within the public health space. This allows me to go back to my colleagues with a different perspective and evidence to support this method as something that should be incorporated into public health practice and interventions.

The process is very different depending on the medium used to create the narrative. I would say the processes that are universal despite the medium would be having an idea of what story you want to tell and how you want to execute it. Once you have those steps then the virtual world is yours to be created as you wish. It is also a very detailed oriented process, in oder to be a successful narrator you need to be able to identify the nuance that’s going make your visuals stronger, your storylines cleaner, and your gaming experience more seamless.

I want to thank this class for helping me blossom when I thought there was no more growth and life left in me to give!