Wisconsin Assembly Bill (A.B) 40 - In-State Tuition for Undocumented Students

 

My Visual Project! is linked here! 

An Example of a visual within the project: 

          Wisconsin Assembly Bill (A.B) 40 is the Act that I focus on in this visual presentation. At the beginning of this project, I wanted to show my process of finding the Act in the same manner that I had expected students to follow. Once I get there I will give insight into the policy and the history behind undocumented students in the United States not receiving in-state tuition. Notably, this is based upon the state's court so in this case, Wisconsin is a highly restrictive state for undocumented policies. I used Nearpod as a platform that was introduced to me in discussion 10 for the graduate project ( thank you, Emily). 

      I liked how the features were easy to use letting you collect images and videos directly on their page from the web and with the press of one button you can narrate each slide. I could quickly type in Spiderman and I would have access to hundreds of photos from google. I also loved being able to narrate and giving someone viewing the project the option to click on the audio. When you watch my visual project you will also see that I added a poll to one of the slides. I wanted to feature one of the ways I could use this PowerPoint to engage my audience. There are other options like drawing that I think could be valuable to use. While I am not an artist if I was going through the official document I could annotate and highlight in sections by slides. I attached lofi to the slides to press since it plays at the same time as my voice-over. I liked that a lot since I incorporate music into my slides for overall engagement.

      At the beginning of my video, I selected multiple screenshots from the site so my audience would understand where to go to frontload their knowledge further on Wisconsin policies. Following this, I choose visuals that would show what I was telling. For example, the photo of the supreme court justice is so that my audience can visualize the people who change policies. The same goes for an image of an undocumented graduate in higher education. It is important to put faces to numbers and I wanted to do this early on for everyone to understand this is not just fact, these laws directly impact many people. I incorporated a first-hand account of undocumented students in the middle of my PowerPoint to do the same. When I get to the history of instate tuition policies Bill Clinton is brought up. I wanted to provide a visual of him and a video including an overview of the information I was presenting so my audience could have additional sources to look through if they wanted to. I love citation hopping as a student and this is one version of that for my audience.

      My understanding of the Wisconsin Assembly Bill grew from the visualization project. I usually don't visualize legislative documents, because that's a daunting task. When their original document is over forty pages I will often break that work up into sections seeing it as more of a fact sheet rather than images. Sometimes this makes me not think about the people that the legislation is impacting. By visualizing the effects and showing visuals of the text, I took a step back and heard from undocumented students. I had an easier time understanding the Act and how it impacted Wisconsin residents by incorporating videos, narration, and images into my presentation. When I looked online to find videos and images connected to my topic I learned more about undocumented students in higher education since it was new information. The animation in the history slide kept my engagement high for the full five minutes, which might be lost in a slide show with only narration. The videos gave more insight into Bill Clinton's decision to enact a law and also into the historical context at that time. I felt that without the videos and images this would be a boring narrative going over chunks of research that would be impossible to visualize. 

      I have always believed in visualization as a vehicle for learning in the classroom. For all of my lessons, I try to incorporate one element of this. When a professor has put in front of me thirty pages of only text I know that I am going to be disengaged. In the high school that I teach in, I have seen how my efforts to incorporate visual aids into my lessons have benefited my students. I brought up Nearpod for an assignment this week since my cooperative teacher and I are changing a paper to a mini presentation to prioritize time. This visual presentation is better than a standard PowerPoint since it can also provide audio. For visualization, I know that giving options to the students also encourages engagement. So providing students with videos, audio, and pictures is helpful to their full comprehension. Following a documentary unit where students had to complete a longer version of what I had finished, I saw how their understanding of a topic developed through visuals. As I noted, I am a big fan of visualization in the classroom and the map on the Higher Education Portal was one of the main reasons I love that site. The visual automatically puts states into perspective on the restrictive state of their policies. When I choose Wisconsin Assembly Bill (A.B) 40 I faced the challenge of going in-depth on dense text, however, this gave me an opportunity to incorporate the history and summary out there. 

    As a teacher, giving students various opportunities to learn is important. I have a lot of visual learners in my class so I could give students the option to read through the dense text or watch a prerecording PowerPoint including different links to assist their knowledge. When we think about instructional strategies in the classroom visualization should take priority.