Ashley Sere

College 1
Professor Ribeiro (F, 2-5)
14 November 2014
Reflection Group Poster Project

In The Madonnas of Echo Park by Brando Skyhorse, the author includes characters that
experience many challenges and obstacles in Los Angeles with respects to gang violence and crimes. In
class, we were assigned to work in groups to portray certain concepts that civilians have experienced in
Los Angeles. Our group chose to portray the black and Latino crimes and gang violence in Los Angeles.
We had also touched upon the issue of immigration as one of the factors to decreasing crime rates. We
supported our concerns of the violence between the blacks and the Latinos as well as researching on how
subcultural environments can influence crime rates.
Our final product came out successful, hugely from the result of communication. Through this
experience, I contributed my time and effort by providing further research on the factors of gang violence
and crimes. I had also communicated and lead the group by initiating task and duties to each person. As a
group, we all worked together to find quotes from other sources outside of The Madonnas of Echo Park.
From these quotes, we chose to further explain the importance of the quote to our topic. There was
nothing too difficult while working on this project, other than trying to fit all of our quotes in the poster.
From this project, I learned that using social media, such as Skype and Facebook, can be very useful
when communicating with each other.
A group can be successful in this project if everyone contributes to the project. For example, our
group members created a schedule of our meetings. During our meetings, we would ask questions, as well
as providing notes to other sources. We all tried to relate to each other and tried to incorporate everyones
ideas into the project. From other groups, I have seen that communication and relationship is essential to
the success of their projects. When I saw others engaging with the audience and feeling proud of their
work, it also made me feel motivated to try harder. In future group projects, I will consider
communicating with my members in person and through social media again. From seeing some groups, I
learned that we should not automatically deny others opinion, even if it contradicts with your idea. We
should be considerate and engaging with others.