Parkland High School seniors dug deep into ethical issues surrounding their chosen career paths and shared what they learned during last Friday’s Reflective Project Extravaganza.
Part of the school’s International Baccalaureate magnet program, the reflective project tasks students with analyzing ethical issues related to the careers they intend to pursue after high school. This could mean aspiring doctors debating performing controversial procedures, digital writers and programmers considering if it’s appropriate to use AI, restauranteurs choosing whether or not to serve alcohol, accountants deciding if they should help their clients take advantage of tax loopholes, and much more.
Students undertake the reflective project towards the end of the IB program and spend months researching their topics. Because the questions involved are so complex and have subjective answers, students have to think critically and carefully to arrive at a position they can be comfortable with. This is especially important because what they learn will directly affect their careers.
“This is the culmination of their career-related program,” said Parkland IB Coordinator Tara Pidgeon. “They have to think very deeply about what they’re going to do, because they’re going to face these situations in real life.”
Dellanie Pinkney-Edwards plans to study interior architecture when she goes to college, and she did her reflective project on universal design. This philosophy focuses on designing products and environments to be as usable as possible for as many people as possible. In architecture, this means building homes with accommodations for people with disabilities by default.
Pinkney-Edwards found in her research that strict adherence to universal design reduces creative options for builders and homebuyers. However, she ultimately concluded that builders should use universal design to some extent to maximize accessibility in the housing market. She came away from the project with a newfound appreciation for how different every job is for a designer.
“This helped me to realize the importance of one-on-one conversations in this career,” Pinkney-Edwards said. “Due to homes being heavily preference based, understanding what the individual client’s preferences and wants are is very important in the home building process.”
Another project on accessibility came from Jahzarria Shore, who’s going to Johnson & Wales University to study baking. Shore researched what it takes to run a bakery that meets a wide variety of dietary restrictions and lifestyles.
It’s easier said than done, as bakers have to keep a wider range of fresh ingredients that are often expensive, carefully avoid cross contaminations with allergy sensitive ingredients, and spend lots of time researching recipes that are authentic to their cultural origins. However, Shore concluded that building a business that makes a wide clientele feel welcome is worth the effort. She’s looking forward to implementing what she learned from the project in her bakery someday.
“I believe that everyone should go out to eat and enjoy whatever food they want without worrying about their health,” Shore said. “After this research, I want to take my studies deeper so I can make food for a wide variety of people.”
The extravaganza featured dozens of seniors who completed the project presenting their findings to Parkland juniors, who’ll have to start their own reflective projects next school year. This format pushed them to practice their public speaking skills and make sure they were confident enough in their ideas to defend them to an audience. It also gave them a chance to think about what they wanted to know about the project when they started and leave a strong foundation for the next class in line.
Presenters at the extravaganza said that they felt more confident in their career choices for having completed the reflective project. Some were more excited than ever to invest in their chosen fields, while others had begun to consider other options, but either way, they had new and valuable information to plan around. It was a rewarding experience for them to think this thoroughly about the decisions they want to make with their lives.
“It opened my eyes to a lot of things and made me want to learn even more,” said Carlacy White, whose project was on whether performers should change their diets and lifestyles to win roles. “I tried to put my all into it.”