As we come near to the end of the term, our team reflected back in the past weeks that we have spent together and come up with a “Moment of Significant Change” graph to visualize the roller coaster of our journey.
Weekly Objectives and Achievements
The Ebb and Flow
During the course of our project, we have experienced several “ups” and “downs.” As we participated in the “Moments of Significant Change” workshop, we were able to reflect on these moments together as a group. We discussed how our emotions were greatly affected by the problems we faced and also the accomplishments we made throughout the different stages of the project. To better visualize these moments of change, we created a graph to portray our changing emotions as well as knowledge gain throughout the weeks.
Getting a Headstart
We are a group of six individuals who barely knew each other before coming to this class. Right from the start, this was one of the challenges that we encountered during the course of our project as we were unsure about each other’s abilities as well as what the group dynamics would be like. Although some of us felt excited about starting the project, we all felt clueless of what we will be working on and what to expect. As a result, we had rather mixed feelings in the beginning of the term.
After our first meeting with Joey, in week three, we were able to learn more about not just the herb gardens and its purpose, but also our community partner. The meeting really helped us in clearing out some of the uncertainties that we have as well as getting us a headstart on the project. Joey’s passion and her drive in providing community services have really inspired us to contribute more to the community.
After our first visit, we felt relieved and happy as we connected with Joey and gained more understanding about the project. From the little time that we, as a group, spent together in the first three weeks of the term, we were also able to get know each other a little bit more which made each of us more comfortable working together. All of these factors really boosted our excitement and confidence in starting out the project.
Tailoring our Project
The week after meeting with Joey we started our project proposal. None of us had ever written a proposal before so we were all learning together. Although this was a new concept for us we were excited to really start discussing our ideas for what we could do with the gardens. Since we did not have a clear idea of what we were going to, part of the proposal was hard to write, especially the methods and outcomes. During tutorial in week five, Ricco gave a short presentation to our TA and the class. Our TA though we did a great job saying that she liked how instead of writing specific methods we gave options because we were waiting for some more information from Joey and the herb garden volunteers. It made us feel good that we were on the right track.
During weeks five and six we continued to write and edit our proposal and write some questions for Joey’s volunteers. We met with Joey during week six to ask more specific questions about the garden like what herbs are in it and how to harvest them. These weeks were a little harder on the group as some of us had midterms and we were not able to attend the meeting with Joey. Also, Joey only had a limited amount of time to meet so we were not able to have a full discussion with her. During these weeks our communication with Joey was a little scattered. This made planning our next step a little harder. When we discussed this with our TA in tutorial, she reassured us that this was a part of working with a community member and that we just have to be flexible.
Community Interaction
By week seven, we finished our proposal as well as the survey for volunteers who help out with the herb gardens. We were getting ready for the highlight of our project – physical interviews with community members. In order to attract more people to come talk to us, we planned to distribute mint tea with herbs harvested on the site. The process of learning how to harvest and make mint tea was interesting for us since we had never done that before. Around that period of time, we received our mark for our proposal and we did not do as well as we thought. Together with the feedback from Susanna, we finalized our proposal before sending it to Joey. Since it was a busy period for all of us, it was quite stressful for us to put everything together at the same time, resulting a downhill in our emotion trend line.
After the revision of our proposal as well as the volunteer survey, we had finally entered week eight, the week that we interacted with the neighborhood residents. At first, we were excited to talk to the community folks and listen to their opinions on the herb boxes, but most people did not show as much interest as we have expected. However, some of them did stop by and provided us a decent amount of responses as data that we can analyze with during the following weeks.
During week nine, we edited our second blog post based on the feedback we received from Susanna, and posted our third blog. Due to the amount of work during mid-term period, we were again feeling little distressed. However, an email from our community partner cheered us up a bit. We were asked to design and sketch out a new sign to place on the herb boxes to raise people’s attention and outline the most important information of the herb gardens. As we have some creative members in our group, we were more than happy to create a new design for the garden boxes in the upcoming week. At the same time, we are also waiting for responses from the herb boxes volunteers.
Projecting our Path to Come
With the term coming to the end, we began to reflect on our journey that led us to where we are. In week ten, we see ourselves all in good spirits as we will complete our final portion of the project with Gordon Neighbourhood House (GNH). From our graph, we also show our knowledge increasing as we all have learned something from our experience, such as having the opportunity to engage and learn the viewpoints on the gardens.
In week 11 the group will be asked to create the draft infographic, outlining how to educate complex food systems to others through graphics. During this week our moods are predicted to be seen rather low because we will all be working on our Academic and Experiential Review (AER) papers. Some of us feel as though it will be a stressful time balancing completing the AER paper and completing other coursework. This will also be a stressful time as we will be planning our final flexible day with GNH and felt that we will need some time to recover from a hectic week.
Projecting our weeks to come, we predict that in week 12 our emotions will be more spirited as we would have successfully completed our community flexible days with GNH and have made many memories through the process from the beginning of the term. Remembering that GNH’s motto “everyone has something to bring to the table”, we aim to have left the community with our footprint towards a more engaging future regarding the herb gardens. Joey, an inspiring individual who stands firmly for creating a warm and welcoming community for all individuals, is someone we all will never forget. We hope to see more people like Joey and the GNH team along with our studies at UBC to help create a better tomorrow.
In our 13th and final week, we look forward to showcasing our journey. From our first day meeting each other to the last day giving a presentation as a team. Our journey has led us to many experiences and opportunities to implement our studies at UBC to a real world situation. Having the freedom to create our own project plan and seeing it through will be a rewarding sensation the group can enjoy together. Here in this week, our knowledge will be at its highest as our journey through the term taught us experiences we will carry with for the rest of our lives. However, there will always be room to continue learning and crossing more experiences such as the one with GNH.
The Graceful Dismount
Reflecting on our journey so far, we feel that we had more disheartening moments throughout the term rather than merry ones. Our drops in mood were very drastic as seen from week four to five and week 10 to 11. Our approach to have a more efficient working system as outlined in our last post wasn’t as effective as how we expected it to be. As a result, we were always scrambling last minute to submit our assignments and do our work. We have tried assigning a task and maintaining an open avenue of communication using a social platform, but it did not work well. We learned that it is really difficult to work as a team if there is a lack of communication.
To overcome this, we are hoping to come together as a group in class next week and talk things out to sort out our problems before it gets any worse. For now, we are living on a knife edge as we tend to hand in assignments right before it is due. We realized that this was a problem because of the lack of communication on the division of work. However, for our graceful dismount, we intend to fix this problem by first, improving our communication system. We believe that this strategy along with a better respect towards one another will help strengthen our group spirit. As we work on the last bit of our project, we will also want to make sure to always consult with our community partner and TA for feedbacks and suggestions. We believe this will help us to see in a broader perspective and hopefully improve the quality of our project.