Cohort 6

During the week we were assigned Cohort groups which are discussion based groups based on a certain theme. My theme for the week was gender. During the discussions we had I noticed that a lot of the time we were always talking about how guys are usually the ones that take over situations because they think they know better. I don't know if it's because we haven't had a lot of time to discuss more in depth about gender, but I feel like this is just the beginning of gender issues. There's the socially constructed roles of men and women that we haven't discussed yet and those differ across all nations. Some remain generally the same across borders but at the same time some are vastly different. I would like to talk about these in our group, but I feel that throughout the conference, they are not encouraging discussion. It's all about the adults and their lectures and there is never time for discussion. I understand that during the question/answer section after the lecture there isn't enough time for everyone to ask their question, but at the same time we need to be able to talk about these things. Especially after yesterday's lectures, everyone had so much to say and when we asked if we could ask more questions after the break, we were shot down.
I think this conference is a good idea, and the lectures are really helping us learn a lot. But we also need to be able to talk about it and make it relevant to us and be able to bring it back to our respective universities. Right now, I'm not sure what to do with all the information that's been thrown at me the past 4 days. I also don't know how to bring it back to JMU and share it with other people or even how to apply it to my life now.  Leadership is all about learning from your mistakes in the past and using that knowledge to move forward and plan for a better future. I think we need to move away from the past and start planning for a better future because dwelling on the past is not doing anything good for anyone.