Northern Environments Poster Presentation Week

   This past week, our little white classroom filled its walls with unique, colourful, and informative posters covering topics from wildlife, mineral deposits, to unique cultural events or stories.  The experience allowed for a quick learning experience to everyone involved as we circled the rooms posters and asked questions to those people standing by their topics.  Posters ranged from professionally designed, and state of the art printing, to the simple hand crafted yet equally if not more alluring posters.

 

   I contributed to the presentations this week with an expansion of my in class presentation on Storytelling in Scandinavia.  I specifically looked at danish poet and author, Hans Christian Andersen, and used a little game to highlight fairy tales Andersen has written and how his social environment and natural environment has shaped the themes he uses in many of his fairy tales. After receiving feedback from my earlier presentation, I heard that many people could recognise a lot of the fairy tales I talked about.  So I challanged everyone
visiting my poster to try and name all 10 fairy tales.   I feel my challenge either excited people, or scared them away a little bit.  With a little push nearly everyone was able to guess The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling.  I was also able to introduce people to new stories, such as The Flying Trunk and The Travelling Companion.  One of the main themes I suggested was the trend for Danish residents to travel off to new lands.  Early Scandinavian Vikings were very well known to travel to distant lands as far as Russia and Newfoundland.  This is also seen through Andersen's stories such as The Flying Trunk, where he sails off into the sky to Turkey to find a new life for himself.  The Travelling Companion is a story of a man who goes on a journey to find a new beginning for himself. It can also be seen in The Little Mermaid as she literally goes away from her home under the sea to a new land.

   Best of all, I had fun with my poster.  I wanted to make mine a little different than what I was expecting everyone else to be doing. I made it interactive, so it can help keep people around the poster for a little longer. This worked in my favour, when I saw someone really looking into my poster or browsing through the stories and resources I brought, it allowed time for me to run over and talk to them a little more, and make sure they got my handout with all my personal information, a smaller photo of my poster, a link to this blog, and just some extra space if they wanted to write something about my poster.

   The first day we had half the class presenting, and half the class viewing. I was one of the people presenting for the hour, but because of a planned timeline I had people rushing through my already short presentation and interactive game. I think the time could be best used if there wasn't a 3 -5 minute timeline to sit at each presentation, and the class didn't have to go in a circle to view all the posters, but people could move around freely to posters they want to view.  I think this would allow the viewer to see the posters they really wanted to see, and creates a challenge for the presenter to come up with unique ways to attract the viewers into their topic.  I also had a couple gaps during the day where I didn't have a viewer.  I thought this was great, it gave me a second to grab something from my bag, and then I started to ask questions and listen to the presenters going on next to me. Getting rid of the order we established the first day would also mean that I wont be repeating my self over and over to new people, but I can have a more natural conversation and continue to expand it with new people listening in.

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   The second day we got rid of all the order, but also got rid of the mass majority of the presenters.  So it really became the class moving across the room looking quickly at the posters and trying to write down a few lines of critique.  The posters I really remembered from being a viewer this day were with presenters.  They were able to pull the interesting facts from their posters that I probably wouldn't have taken the time to read if they were not present. This made it interesting for me to ask additional questions and to really get into their presentations.   A couple of the posters I still don't understand what they were for. For example, one poster was of three penguins and two of them were bleeding.  The poster may have done a good job at drawing someone in, to ask questions, but there was no resources available to figure out what the poster meant.  Had there been a presenter they could explain what was going on with the penguins or if they had a handout that could direct the viewer to a website that describes the topic.  I'm left thinking there is a underground penguin fighting community that is causing these cute animals harm.

  I think the presentations this week were mostly a positive experience, but I still think there is room for improvement for future years doing a poster presentation week.  I think the most effective and memorable posters were posters that were actually accompanied by a presenter.  This allowed for someone to really highlight an interesting fact that I may not have read on the poster if they didn't draw my attention to it.   More time would need to be available if we were expected to see all the posters.  I really did enjoy the experience learning about everyone's research, and could genuinely tell when someone had a real interest in their topic opposed to someone just doing an assignment.

Did you try and guess all the ten fairy tales on my poster??