Recommendations for Action!

After doing this project my group came up with many solutions into making someone feel better about themselves when their community thinks otherwise.
For these, we'll be showing a couple of skits written in second person.

Skit 1

One bright sunny day you're walking down the street. You see someone who is quite different from you. The first thing that comes to your mind is, "He's gay." But instead of making judgment, comments, or facial expressions you keep a strait face and stay quiet. You then notice that he has the latest style of shoes on. As you get closer to him you say, "Aay man, them shoes wet!"
The person seems quite happy because of the comment. "Thank you!" He says, walking away with a smile.

Skit 2

You are gathering and you notice that two people of the same gender are sending subliminal messages at each other because they are attracted to each other. You also notice that neither seems to be willing to make a move to the other, most likely afraid of what others would say. You decide to do something about it, you walk up to one of them and say, "Go talk to him, he's a pretty cool guy, you should so go talk to him!"
The person looks slightly nervous. "No, what if someone says something about it?"
"Don't worry about what other people say!" You encourage. "Worry about how you approach that guy you like."
He looks much more sure of himself now, much more determined and ready to take a chance. "Okay, I'll go for it. Thanks for the encouragement."
"No problem." You reply.

Summary; What We Found in Our Research

We found some rather interesting things in our research. We interviewed both people who believed homosexuality was fine and those who did not. Over all, the people who were fine with homo/bisexuality said that it was good to have diversity and that people should be aloud to love who they want. Those who weren't okay with such things had rather weak reasoning, saying it simply wasn't right. We only had two people who was against gays interviewed, but I've never heard a very legitimate reason from any of my sources.

People should be able to love who they wish; homosexuality is different, not bad. One homosexual interviewee said, "I'd like to show them that we are the same people and do the same things as an aveage person, we just like the same sex..." This is from an average student from Envision Academy. In the interview this person also says it's important to have a diverse community, she has many friends and believes that others shouldn't judge a person just because they like the same gender.

This is the final data table we came up with, we couldn't analyze the third person's interview because it was incomplete. Numbers one, two, four, six, and seven were all students of Envision Academy; number five was a teacher at this school.

Person	Orientation	Theme	Summary	Key Quote
1	Homosexual	Good to have differences.	Proud to be homosexual, believes it's good to have a diverse community.	(To the question: ?) "Show them that we are the same people and do the same things as average people."
2	Bisexual	People shouldn't judge others just because they're bisexual.	Zie* was worried about how others would treat zir so often hides the fact zie is bisexual.	(To the question: ?) "That they could see who we really are, see that we're the same sort of people and we're really cool."
4	Bisexual	People shouldn't judge others just because they're bisexual.	Judged by others because zie is bisexual.	"They don't understand."
5	Heterosexual	There are people who truly love others of the same gender, this isn't a bad thing.	People should be more excepting of differences, it's good some know who they are.	"I love when kids know who they are at a young age, that's a sign of confidence."
6	Bisexual	Be who you are.	Doesn't let others bring zir down, will love who zie wants to.	"No matter what people tell me to do Ima always going to do what I wanna do; if I like girls, Ima like girls, if I like guys, I like guys.
7	Heterosexual	Doesn't believe people should be homosexual/bisexual.	Believes homosexuality is just a faze and that people aren’t supposed to be like that.	"Boys some be acting too girly, they be doing too much stuff. Girls is okay I don't have a problem with it but it's still nasty."

 Our research has shown that homosexuals and bisexuals are judged and are in most cases treated differently because of this. Some are more out going than others on the issue, most students believe it's important to have an open mind and accept differences. There are some that disagree (number three also seemed to disagree from what we could gather) but the majority were interested in change. We hope that by showing this information we bring more awarness to the topic and, with all hopes acceptance.

*Zie: Gender-neutral pronoun.

Methodology

For this project there was a rather short process. We picked this research topic by Trevor (our 10th grade English teacher) giving us a paper to name our top three choices  of what topic we wanted to do our project on. He had told us whatever our first choice was, was what we wanted to work on the most. He then told us that there was not going to be a promise for us to be able to work on. The next day he showed us our groups and what topics we were going to work on. We agreed on choosing our research tool as being interviews. We interviewed seven people, each interview was only a few questions making them less than ten minutes long.

During the interview process we really did not hear anything from the interviews that stood out to our ears. As we asked the questions we planned to ask, they told us things we think of as regular, things we would say. None of the people we interviewed said the same as another but the meanings were all around the same.

Choosing our research question and research tool was an easy thing to do for us. We decided on our research question by thinking hard on what we thought would be a little challenging for them to answer. When some of the questions did not fit right to our English teacher, Trevor, he would give us ideas of what we should change. We picked the research tool by thinking of making a video of the interviews, but none of our group members knew how to make and edit a video. Instead we chose to make the blog you now see.

An Introduction to this Blog

Our research question is, "Do you feel like you are happy withing yourself and the way the world sees you?" The main questions that we wanted to answer were, "Do you feel like you are an outcast to your community? How do you think your community treats you as a person? Why do you feel a certain way about homosexuals? How would you like the world to treat you?"
We picked these questions as the major questions to ask because the bases of this this project was to pick a topic on what our community needs to improve on. With this in mind, we decided to work on eliminating homophobia. We chose this topic because we feel, as a group, that people should treat homosexuals with respect and as if they weren't attracted to the same sex. We also believe that everyone should be treated the equally no matter what sex they are attracted to. That does not decline them as an individual. In our project, we interviewed people who are homosexual, people who are homophobic, and teachers at our school (Envision Academy) who see homosexuality and who see homophobia. Now that we have this information, we hope to get people to treat homosexuals with respect and to make them comfortable. It was important that we did this research rather than adults because it happens more with teenagers/youth than with adults.