Night of the Arts

What is your CAS project and how is it helping the community? My CAS project is split into two halves. The first half is what Isa and I just accomplished, that was educating our classmates and peers in an engaging way about neurodivergence and what some of them entail(ADHD, dyslexia, autism spectrum disorder, and intellectual disorder). This is helping the community, specifically our school community because in order to establish change, you first need to educate people. Our first step was educating our peers on it to hopefully share some of that passion that we have, now for this next half of the project, we will be raising money to buy materials that the BEST team needs for its current and future students. The educating aspect is for others to gain interest in our CAS project and also for them to understand more about them so that they can be more aware of their behavior and comments towards these people who have these disorders. What are some interesting aspects of your project that you think people should know about? What do you need from the community? One aspect of my project I think is incredibly interesting is that when we did our workshop for dyslexia where we had people read out loud a paragraph where the words would jumble and change quite quickly to simulate the experience of reading with dyslexia, people were trying to help out the person who was reading by giving them the word they struggled with which just stressed them out more and put pressure on them. What we need from the community is to listen and understand as much as they can, if they understand the struggles people go through then they will be more aware of what they are saying and can then be more careful with their word choices. Of the 7 learning outcomes of CAS, I believe that a lot of them could be applied to our project. Both Isabel and I are incredibly passionate about this because this project will probably directly affect both our fellow neurodivergent peers and ourselves. We are both committed to creating a safer and more comfortable environment for everyone, especially people like us. Both of us have undertaken challenges and developed new skills in the process. I have learned to be more engaging in presentations and when teaching something, I also worked on my public speaking skills which is something I struggle with a lot. This is also an issue of global importance because this is not something that only happens within the confines of our school. Small comments made, and accommodations not being made for people who need them happen all the time. This is more frequently noticed in schools where grades tend to reflect that, but it happens everywhere. People all over the world don’t know about neurodivergence and a lot of the time people who are neurodivergent struggle socially and educationally because of this.