Its almost December! The term is ending, projects are finalizing, stress levels are climbing, homework and papers are piling, and Professors/TAs are marking. Before we can dive into all that, Group 4 wants to take a moment to say ‘Adieu.’

Farwell, Adieu, Goodbye from Group 4 to you
Farwell, Adieu, Goodbye from Group 4 to you
http://vocabmadeeasy.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/adieu.gif

 

Our journey definitely had its ups and downs, times of success and times of desperation, and successful and failed moments with our community partner, our teaching team and our group members. What better way of analyzing the outcomes and exploring the experiences in depth then Role et al’s (2001) What, So What, Now What reflective model (Rolfe et al., 2001).

—–

     For this blog post, we’re asked to focus on one moment of significance (MOS). This must be one of our hardest tasks yet, limiting all the progress of this term to a single MOS. However, if we had to choose an illuminating moment, it would be when we started assessing our achievements not only personally as group members but also as citizens working with a community partner.

 

What? —

“Let it out and let it in, hey Jude, begin.”

(“Hey Jude,” The Beatles, 1968, Side A)

Initially, we were overcome with the difficulty of working on a big and confusing project with, essentially, strangers. When we communicated our strengths, weaknesses and goals with one another, and utilized each individual’s skills, we quickly were able to become united and productive. Next, with a strong group dynamic, we approached our community project with an open-mind. We set clear objectives and conducted an assessment of the Grandview legion. We tried to carry this through by extending all the habits we learned as a group to our interactions with our community partner. And this is where our MOS begins.

When evaluating something, it is a natural tendency to look at what is missing, what is wrong or what isn’t working. This was true for our group; when we analyzed what went wrong, we improved. However, with the Grandview Legion, the assessment had to be asset-based, specifically focusing on the ways in which the legion utilised its food related infrastructure and community programming as assets within the community (City of Vancouver, 2013). We thought that the outcome of our project is presenting the City of Vancouver and Vancouver Food Policy Council with an evaluation of the legion accompanied with suggestions of potential activities or services the legion could provide for its members. Basically, our MOS was realizing that simply looking at the existing qualities and assets of the legion and acknowledging them was of great value (in general, and to meeting goals 1 through 5 of the Vancouver Food Strategy) (City of Vancouver, 2013).

 

So What? —

“take a sad song and make it better”

(“Hey Jude,” The Beatles, 1968, Side A)

Surprisingly, most of what we learned came from not finding what we expected to find. In accordance with Shulman (2015), our greatest educational experiences in this project happened when pushing through moments of confusion and failure. Within our group, failure was our friend because it jumpstarted the process of confronting our weakness and subsequently minimizing them (Cohn, 2015). On the other hand, its counterproductive to use this method on a community facility. A school team has coursework and consequent grades. For the most part, there is right and wrong criteria for academic assignments. If we treated the legion’s assessment like we did our group’s assessment, this is implying that there is a right way to operate a legion. But of course, there isn’t. There isn’t an area to fix or a problem to identify. Simply by looking at the food-related infrastructure that exist within the legion, we are helping establish and identify a basis that can be used for a variety of future projects that could contribute to community building and strength community food systems in the Grandview neighbourhood (City of Vancouver, 2013).

So, although we always understood the benefits of asset-based community development, we got a new understanding of what kind of results to look for and how to use such information.  Moreover, in many ways, this understanding helped us break free of the mindset that if something does not go as planned, it is a failure. Everything can be a learning experience one way or another. Better explained by John Wooden,

-John Wooden
-John Wooden
https://fiercelyflared.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/df7a344bb33cc1c8655bcac105605317.jpg

 

 Now What?

“You have found her, now go and get her”

(“Hey Jude,” The Beatles, 1968, Side A)

Now, we “make the best of the way things turned out.” So we understand in depth our research process and the significance of our results, so now we make it credible. Ultimately, this project all falls on the end results (the infographic and final report).  Kodish & Gittelsohn (2011) share our sentiments on the difficulty of systematically analyzing qualitative data. They go on to describe a non-linear guideline that we can follow, which starts during data collection and ends with the written representation of our project. Our group is proud to have already followed many of the steps outline in the article. The biggest improvement we can make is ‘decoding’ all the information and finding themes (Kodish & Gittelsohn, 2011). This advice is important for the organization of the infographic and the literature needed for the final report.

Wrapping up our LFS 350 project, it is important for us to reflect on our goals moving forward. Because this project was based in an academic setting and required for us to go out and look for information on our behalf, it gave us the opportunity to face unexpected outcomes and to be open to modifying our objectives and expectations as we went through the whole process. Perhaps this is something that we will likely face many more times in our future academic and non-academic experiences, and reflecting back on this project will help remind us to be open minded and ready for change.

And with that we say,

‘Hey Jude, we made it!’

– Group 4

 

Works Cited

Beatles, The. (1968). Hey Jude. On The White Album [Video File]. London: Trident Studios. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=varEnzEsfaU

City of Vancouver. (2013). What feeds us: Vancouver food strategy. Retrieved from: http://vancouver.ca/people-programs/vancouvers-food-strategy.aspx

Cohn, G. (Producer). (2015, May 20). Failure Is Your Friend: A Freakonomics Radio Rebroadcast [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from http://freakonomics.com/podcast/failure-is-your-friend-a-freakonomics-radio-rebroadcast/

John Wooden Quotes. (n.d.). Retrieved November 28, 2016, from https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/johnwooden120997.html

Kodish, S., & Gittelsohn, J. (2011). Systematic Data Analysis in Qualitative Health Research: Building Credible and Clear Findings. Sight and Life, 25(2), 52–56.

Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D., & Jasper, M. (2001). Critical reflection for nursing and the helping professions: A user's guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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