Month: November 2017

”Positive people producing fresh insight and growing with the difficulties that may face us rain or shine.” -Group 1

Welcome back

It seems almost incredible the speed at which 2017 is moving, with November beginning and the first snow already upon us, it certainly has been a year full of events. As the seasons continue changing, with Winter just around the corner, we reflect upon moments of significant change that have helped define us throughout the term. As individuals, we have learned how to further harness our observational skills, interviewing abilities and urban food system analysis skills. The engagement required in Vancouver’s Food Strategy and Resilience: Food Production project has taught us how to properly articulate public food assets and communicate results and issues in urban agricultural systems, skills that would not have been possible without one another.

The last few months have been quite the experience, and while our data may just provide a baseline for future food production resiliency projects in Vancouver, we hope it helps to contribute to a more sustainable and diverse food system. While we are busy at work finishing our data analysis of well-precedented urban agricultural systems, in hopes of contributing to the greater good, we begin work on our infographic. Amidst our busy schedules we hope you all remember to stay warm; before we know it, Winter will have come. Group 1 wishes you a healthy and blissful November in the meanwhile

Weekly Objectives and Achievements

Previous weeks: What we accomplish?

In the preceding weeks, we have accomplished many of the goals we had set for ourselves in terms of group communication and organization, as well as goals for our Community-Based project (CBEL). For our CBEL Project, we have overall completed our proposed plan by verifying our direction and objectives, in understanding the city of Vancouver’s food production resiliency. We have enacted this plan by contacting various organizations’ leaders from Montreal, Vancouver, New York and Boston. This was necessary in order to collect data on food production space, yield, and infrastructure. Internally as a group, we overcame our initial conflicts and became more cohesive. This was evident in our effective distribution of tasks throughout group members such as contacting our organizations of interest and delegating research responsibilities. The organization has also been improved through sufficient utilization of communication methods, management of conflicting schedules and support.

Accomplishments included:

• conducting interviews
• delegating positions for infographic work
• data analysis
• weekly reflection

Upcoming weeks: What are our Objectives?

Now that we have conducted most of our research and compiled most of our data into excel sheets, our next logical step is to start building the foundation of our infographic. The ultimate goal is to achieve a professional, well designed yet easily readable infographic that we may share with Vancouver and the world. In order to do so, we are currently researching infographics. None of our group members are experienced with infographics; however, we are hoping that since we are not procrastinating that we will be at an advantage come further down the line. We conceptually understands the advantages and disadvantages of presenting by an infographic. Through researching other projects in our community, and engaging with others, we hope to build a social rapport with our stakeholders.

Since naturally after our project is completed, these are the people who will be most interested in our findings. We, as a group of prospective professionals, are in preparation for presenting our finding to the best of our ability. We know that this project was not only for us, but also for our future classmates and leaders. We introspect ourselves to see the flaws and limitations in the project. However, to some extent, we expect some unpredictable curve balls to be thrown our way such as: stakeholders refusing to come in contact with us, members failing to produce expected results, or being redirected when trying to collect salient and meaningful data. Rejection is definitely become a foresee circumstance.

By understanding potential, foreseeable uncertainties ahead, we acknowledge them. We were originally inspired by Shulman (2005), the author of Pedagogies of uncertainty; he said, “In professional education, it is insufficient to learn for the sake of knowledge and understanding alone; one learns in order to engage in practice.” We interrupted this accepting that challenges employ us with opportunities to practice our adaptability and understanding of conceptualized knowledge. If we understand a topic of well enough, we should all be able to execute our plans, regardless of which group member accomplishes it.

On the other hand, uncertainties challenge us to focus on our interactions as a group. For instances, our presentation skills which may be improved by pushing one another to give more examples, or explain answers in more clarity, or even make more concise and coherent conclusions (Shulman, 2005). In other words, we could resolve upcoming challenges with better reflections and planning ahead for upcoming stresses between academic workloads, extracurricular priorities and community expectations (Valley, 2017). As professionals, we do not learn by theories and practice alone, tasks and unexpected challenges are not resolved with single answers but with action and judgement (Shulman, 2005). As individuals, we draw from our experiences. Essentially, we argue that our experiences define us, and despite trying to be rational or logical, we will always try our best to resolve our issues with methods and techniques we’ve deemed successful in the past or what not to do, due to our past experiences (Shulman, 2005). As a group we practiced pedagogy by proposing ideas for the infographic and then pushing each other to better elaborate on why we are suggesting what we are, and relating it to our topic at hand: food production and resiliency.

Despite the project nearing its’ end, the journey of our academic professionalism has only just begun. We have gained so much experience and realistic logical skills in a short amount of time. This perspective will continue to stretch and hone the skills necessary to address potential anxieties that are bound to arise. Skills such as interpretation and systems thinking will allow us to be more confident in our explanations and thoughts, and rise to possible challenges that are bound to face us as professionals (Valley, 2017).

In all actuality, we believe that this first step into the Food System is a greater achievement than our actual goal of conducting an analysis of Food Production in urban agriculture in Vancouver, as our efforts were not fruitless. While in theory, yes, we would have wasted 4 months had we come up with nothing as a result, but our efforts we leave us with data analysis, honed interviewing skills and genuine confidence. We have gained a greater integrity in ourselves as leaders from it, and have succeeded in our commitment of willing to contribute efforts to serve our community with a more responsible and ethical service.

Moment of Significant Change Workshop

(Note: our graph’s slopes have arrows attached because we never stop learning, growing and feeling, which is the beauty of this reflection. We noticed the inverse nature of our knowledge slope to our emotions slope, which we found as a common occurrence among other groups. Pivotal moments of change where the slopes become sharp include description of why it veered in which direction it did.)

During last week’s tutorial session we took time to reflect as a group on our “Moments of Significant Change,” in a workshop led by Colin Dring. This exercise forced us to reflect on our progressive journeys in terms of knowledge, emotions and skills from week 0: from day 1 in picking our projects to week 8: arguably our midway point. This task then left us to question how we’d realistically or ideally like to see the future of this project leaving us up until the end at week 13.

It was quite interesting to see all the commonalities between six separate graphs constructed in private; it reminded us of our vexing moments of weak communication, organizational skills and expectations of one another had led to these results. The workshop then tasked us to collaborate each of our graphs into one graph representing the group’s voice in each aspect of knowledge, emotions and skills  that illustrated our experience thus far. Afterwards, as a collective group, we discussed these feelings and explained why we felt what at a particular time to come to a consensus of where to draw each slope and to which degree of varying steepness. 

We noticed feeling similarly, during different weeks in our journey:  we started the project with mediocre knowledge of Food Production and Resiliency, but admit to feeling excited about a new surfacing topic in the food system world, and we were thrilled to see how much we’ve all learned throughout the progress, hitting our greatest stride currently as we are at week 8 after conducting interviews and reviewing documentation in Vancouver. We hope to continue learning more even while finishing up our infographic at week 13 about the demographics of food production and urban agriculture, even beyond the scope of this course. Before this project started, no one in our group was experienced in blogging and frankly our skills may not have been as high as we would have liked to believe. Up until week 8 we are still learning and learning how to be confident in our skills of analysis, interview and research. While we aren’t necessarily ashamed of our low reflection on our skills, we expected to learn more about blogging and infographics during the course rather than being expected just to know how to do it after several entries. There is just so much more we wish to learn, which is why we tried to be realistic with our graph’s depiction. Finally, we address our turbulent emotion’s trend line: we started the semester not knowing anything and being very optimistic; however, realizing we had no actual community leader to address concerns too, and then having our proposal rejected was very dejecting. It certainly has been a roller-coaster of emotions, that’s for sure. Moreover, starting a project with essentially strangers and having to rely on them for your academic well-being was very straining as well. As the weeks move forward, our group is praying for the best but bracing for the worst when we illustrate our downward sloping graph. With other academic priorities arising, and having a better understanding of our time management skills, we expect to be at lows and highs veering the end of our semester.  

The process of illustrating our collective graph as you can see above was quite refreshing. The tutorial left us time to walk around and inspect reflections of how other groups were coping with the anxiety of their own projects. It also allowed us to see that other groups were experiencing the same distraught and frustrations during similar moments on our timelines from feedback and rejections. A key moment of how we all similarly agreed with the emotion graph trend, which steeply, sloped downwards to an extreme low nearing the end of the term. It’s safe to say Colin may have one of the most realistic tutorial class’ of the semester. With other priorities and personal issues that come with being a student, we expect to feel overwhelmed with looming deadlines which is why by planning for them, we hope to avoid them. As the projection of these feelings on the graph has visually provided us with something to expect in the upcoming weeks. Yes, there will be some other formidable stresses which are inevitable throughout this term. This time of reflection served as another reminder of consequences to come if we do not manage our time better, in order to avoid feeling as low as we have, especially if we procrastinate.  

It certainly has been an emotional project, as you can see displayed on our graph; however without a certain amount of anxiety and risk, there are limits to how much learning can occur, therefore we embrace it (Shulman, 2005). We believe a project is only as good as how you end it, and take humility and  learning from the obstacles that may continue arising. This time around, we will not feel reject, we will not be emotional. We will take action. We will make judgement. We will succeed. Group 1 will brace for the worse but expect the best as positive people, growing with the difficulties that may face us rain or shine.

The Graceful Dismount

Organization has never been one of Group 1’s strongest asset; however, feasibility has been. As such, we have come to accept our flaws such as poor time management and learned to plan, plan and plan; therefore, we have set internal timelines and due dates for certain aspects of the project. Figures 1.1 and 1.2 shown below are examples of  internal timelines and due dates for certain aspects of the project that we have planned after the workshop reflection activity, where we are clearly addressing our organizational issues. With democracy and delegation, we will be utilizing members to their strongest capabilities for the infographic and presentation. With research and data analysis having been conducted, and resources being collected, we are setting ourselves up for success.  

At one point in The American Life’s (2011) podcast, we greatly related to was when they said if you are trying to create Rambo, you don’t coddle him when he is born, you give him the experiences to fight to be Rambo (The American Life, 2011). We felt these words resonate with our experiences throughout the course of this semester. When only after we completed our proposal with days away from the submission date were we warned about the flaws in our original idea and what we should have done. It was to give us the experiences to fight to become something greater. We have come to accept our flaws of having a poor time management skill, and we learned to keep on practicing our skills in   adaptability by way of advanced planning. We expect to succeed through this.

Figure 1.1 – LFS 350 Group 1 Schedule Tracker

Figure 1.2 – A shared folder that contains data sheets and documentation for Vancouver’s Food Production and Resiliency project.

(Note: In order to hold team members more accountable to complete their tasks, we organized the documents in a shared file and wrote the deadlines on the spreadsheets to be clear who is doing what in a clear, convenient and accessible manner. )

At this point in the semester, we have gained more knowledge about rooftop gardens and a greater understanding of strengths of group members. Following the presentation and infographic, we want to utilize members to these strengths. Members who participated more heavily on the interviewing aspects of the project will not be presenting the infographic. We came to a consensus that we would like members who had more hands-on work dealing with the quantifiable units of the project gathered from research on Vancouver to convey the numbers on our infographic and they would most be comfortable relying sources of the data and be able to reveal more salient information than others.

While there is always room to continuing growing and learning, we are satisfied with our achievements. Some group members personally have families who work in Food Production facilities, who work strenuous graveyard shifts and early mornings. The humility of our project reminds of the labour and efforts of those contributing to Vancouver’s Food Production. Hence, as a group we appreciate how these busy people continue to contribute for improving food security for our futures. While it may not seem like it, the numbers on our findings are a greater representation than they appear at first glance; which is why, we look forward to inspiring you with our findings.

”Be humble. Stay focused. Live healthy.”- Group 1.

Reference

Shulman, L. S. (2005). Pedagogies of uncertainty. Liberal Education, 91(2), 18–25.

This American Life. (2011, December 2). 452: Poultry Slam 2011: Latin Liver. Podcast retrieved from https://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/452/poultry-slam-2011?act=3#play

Valley, W. (2017). Session 9 – Indigenous Food Sovereignty: Required Readings + Resources. Retrieved from: http://lfs350.landfood.ubc.ca/session-notes/term-1-session-notes/session-7-indigenous-food-sovereignty-moments-of-significant-change/