Week 7

Objectives:

  • Individual completion of the Academic and Experiential Review outline.
  • To confirm the interview time with our Legion branch.

Achievements:

  • Exchanged outlines for feedback within the group during the tutorial session.
  • Contacted the Legion branch but did not receive a concrete response from them, so we decided to visit the branch and in hopes to be able to conduct some interviews during the Sunday Meat Draw event.

Week 8

Objectives:

  • To visit the Legion branch during the Sunday Meat Draw to introduce our project and obtain information about the kitchen’s use and the events that occur at the Legion through interviews.
  • To have a group meeting in person or online after this meeting to evaluate our results and refine strategies to improve our results.

Achievements:

  • We managed to interview some Legion members and guests that participated in the Sunday Meat Draw event; and one of the volunteers at the Legion. Although we did not have the chance to visit their kitchen, or obtain more information from the staff as intended, we managed to schedule a meeting  to interview staff, and take pictures of the Legion, particularly the kitchen, next Friday.

Week 9

Objectives:

  • To share personal and group Moments of Significant Change within the group.
  • To visit the Legion branch again to conduct more interviews, explore the kitchen and take relevant pictures of the Kitsilano branch that can contribute to the successful completion of our project.

Achievements:

  • Obtained more information from the staff members about the history of the branch and the events that take place there
  • Visited the kitchen and evaluated the kitchen facility
  • Took pictures of the Kitsilano Legion’s kitchen
  • Created a chart for the group’s Moments of Significant Change.

Moments of Significant Change

Many significant moments have occurred, for better or for worse, from the start of the course up until this point in time. Not only did our individual views of our group members change, but also our views of the community, challenging and strengthening some of our beliefs.
Many significant moments have occurred, for better or for worse, from the start of the course up until this point in time. Not only did our individual views of our group members change, but also our views of the community, challenging and strengthening some of our beliefs on existing community assets to build stronger, more sustainable communities for the future

Knowledge: 

As indicated by the graph in the picture above, as well as our initial blog post, we barely knew anything about Legions at the beginning of the course; however, after our discussion with Ron at the West Point Grey Legion, we had a better picture of the history and purpose of Legions. What seemed like a promising start turned into a disaster as we found out the Legion we were assigned to had relocated (Thanks Will. Appreciate it.), and we spent approximately a week finding out whether there was another Legion that would be relatively convenient for everyone – or at least still in Vancouver… Fortunately, we found the Billy Bishop Legion located in Kitsilano.

Our knowledge saw a positive trend as the course progressed, with a significant moment of change being Julian Napolean’s guest lecture during week 7. He provided insight into the struggles and experiences of the Dane-zaa Nation and other indigenous groups, and connected the relationship between land, community and food in powerful and engaging manner.   The upward trend of knowledge on our graph is related to our second visit to the Billy Bishop during our Week 8 Flexible Learning period, where we gained a lot of insight regarding member’s usage of the Legion and the operation of the Legion’s kitchen.

We hope that our knowledge continues to improve, learning more about the food insecurity issues in Vancouver, as well as applying the concept of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD), an approach where assets, instead of deficits, of a community are emphasized and it is believed that individuals, no matter how seemingly insignificant, have gifts and services to offer. As a result, communities as a whole can function more efficiently and independently. However, it can be difficult at times to use ABCD, especially when there are so many aspects of the Legion that may not seem like they have much use. Hopefully, we can learn to view the Legion with a different perspective and appreciate these aspects and then utilize them as existing community assets to build stronger, more sustainable communities for the future

Skills: 

We thought skills would show a similar trend to our knowledge, but this was not the case! Starting confident with our skills, such as interviewing and blog writing, these constantly decreased as time went on, slowly drowning from the constructive feedback from Colin and our peers. As the term went on, we were overwhelmed by other courses so we could not effectively utilize the feedback that we received, so our skills kept plummeting, until the lowest point when we got our feedback for the proposal – we thought we were skilled in drafting proposals, but we clearly had to refocus and adapt.

However, after mid-October, we eventually got back on track, and our skills started to improve again. We reached a high point in the second Flexible Learning period (Week 8) as we realized that our interview skills and subsequent data collection were not bad, and our proposal and report writing skills improved after Week 9 as we learned how to effectively dissect scholarly articles in terms of the various aspects of the papers (i.e. Purpose, Methods, etc).

Experiences: 

Our experiences varied significantly throughout the first 9 weeks. However, it can been seen that our experiences are the highest during Flexible Learning periods, perhaps due to the fact that we have an opportunity to apply what we learned in lectures to real life situations. We hope that the positive experiences that we had during Week 8 can continue to improve our ability to collaborate, so that we can more effectively  meet the needs of the Legion. With all group members on the same page, issues that could not be addressed individually can be addressed by the combination of our experiences and knowledge.

Although it may seem like our project is not going well as shown by the many low points in knowledge, skills and experiences, the quote by Shulman (2005), in “Pedagogies of uncertainty” really resonated with us – “Without a certain amount of anxiety and risk, there’s a limit to how much learning occurs.” If we are always relatively happy, in terms of our knowledge, skills and experiences, there is no potential for personal or community growth as we would just be static, not improving to our full potential.

Reflection: 

Although the Moments of Significant change exercise seemed trivial, it offered a chance for us to slow down, have a serious reflection period so that we can reassess our goals, re-communicate our hopes, and effectively carry out what we need to do to properly assess the Legion’s kitchen infrastructure and how we can use their assets to better serve the surrounding community.

 

The Graceful Dismount

To successfully complete the project and ensure everything goes smoothly despite all the uncertainties, our updated strategies include:

  • Create a concrete to-do list and update it as the project progresses; we might also need to be flexible to deal with last minute changes, because as we learned in our lecture session, things often do not go as planned.. It is also how we choose to look and react to these uncertainties that will lead us towards a successful project completion and at the same time an increase in personal growth.
  • Gather all our interview data, then organize and analyze the information to address the purpose of our project and use this to construct our final report in an effective manner.
  • Compare our Legion’s operation with other Legions and assess whether there could be collaboration or associations between these branches that can possibly bring about more benefits to the community
  • Research upon other data such as historical facts and look upon other non-traditional methods of research such as looking at press releases to inspire creativity that can be presented as stronger evidences in our report
  • As phrased by Vince Lombardi, “The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual.” Thus for effective teamwork, which is a major contributor to each member’s position in this course, we agreed that we all need to be play our part and be willing to endeavour our best towards all the group work assigned for this course. Hence, one idea includes assigning tasks equally to each group member with a deadline that is agreed upon. Effectively achieving this requires communicating efficiently within the group (by providing constructive feedback and always checking in with each other to make sure everyone is fine) and with Colin, our teaching assistant, to make sure that the group is on the right track and lastly, ensuring everyone is strictly following the assignment rubrics and completing tasks before the deadline.