Blog Post 2: Proposal and Progress
To begin, we have documented a Proposal Report to highlight the main purpose of the project and how we will obtain these results. Along the way, there may be alterations in our Proposal and, therefore, weekly and future goals can help us track our progress. The success of our project will depend on our organization and commitment throughout the term.
Project Proposal
Weekly Objectives & Achievements
Week 1:
- Decide on the topic of our community project
- Got to know our group members and identify individual strengths through interests and academic background
- Created a Facebook page as platform for communication and sharing of ideas
Week 2:
- Familiarize ourselves with the components of the food system
- Created a systems diagram for our community project during the tutorial session
- Searched for community kitchens
- Created a Google Doc to assign roles to each member, and weekly tasks to be completed ahead of the deadlines
Week 3:
- Complete Blog Post 1
- Finished Blog Post 1 in accordance with the guidelines
- Drafted an email template to communicate with community kitchen partners
Week 4:
- Begin our Proposal Report
- Revised and edited Blog Post 1 with feedback from our TA
Week 5:
- Complete our Proposal Report
- Start Blog Post 2
- Finalized our Proposal Report with feedback from our TA
- All members successfully completed the TCPS (Tutorial Course on Research Ethics) and obtained certificates
Week 6:
- Contact our list of community kitchens through email or phone
- Assign roles to the members responsible for visiting community kitchens (e.g. contacting community kitchens, conducting survey, recording observations)
- Complete Blog Post 2
- Roles were distributed based on strengths and preference
- Finalized Blog Post 2 in accordance with the guidelines
Moment of Significance
What?
Interdisciplinary is a theme that has been emphasized repetitively throughout each and every single LFS course. Individually, we all understand the theoretical significance of the concept and appreciate the opportunity that allows all five of us – who come from various academic backgrounds: food and nutrition, urban planning, sustainable agriculture, sports nutrition and food market analysis, to work together. From the very first meeting, however, we immediately realized the challenge of putting this theory into practice, as each individual holds different interests and preferences with regard to choosing the topic for our community project. Coming together and incorporating our personal visions to create a new set of goals that satisfy our needs — is definitely not as easy as it may sound. While trying to understand each member’s majors and keeping an open mind to any possibilities, we resolved to deductive reasoning in order to eliminate the community project topics that did not highlight our team dynamic. After narrowing down to roughly five topics, each member listed their top three choices to further eliminate unwanted options. To our surprise and relief, most of us provided a very similar list, which enabled us to make our final decision with ease and proceed to apply for the Community Kitchens project.
So What?
We had a huge assumption about the major hindrance that prevents people from different disciplines to work together. It is true, that the benefits of interdisciplinary teamwork are not widely known, and therefore not much opportunity are available for this type of organization. However, for us – who are open-minded individuals, who are spoon-fed with the opportunity, there is still a challenge! In fact, we have deduced, that to bring an interdisciplinary group of people together is hard, but to get them work together is even harder. Therefore, it is important that there is a framework of principles to guide us through the experience.
As a team, we have come up with a few guidelines for members to:
- Listen to and understand each others’ backgrounds
- Maintain an open mind to ensure all opinions are heard
- Incorporate common interests and assets to form a better team vision
- Keep a good relationship with our working partners
We based our actions on the common goals we share. Once we decided on what we expect, as a whole, we effectively picked out our decision. Working together from different disciplines is not necessarily a complicated progress, nor should it be a bad experience.
Now What?
Now that we have successfully concluded our research topic to be on Community Kitchens, other issues on teamwork might arise. Therefore, we need to keep in tune with each other and continue on this journey together, by integrating the diversity of everyone’s individual point of view into unified systems (Wujec, 2013). We are bound to come across obstacles along the way thus, communication is very important in ensuring an efficient team environment.
Upcoming Objectives and Strategies
- Visit community kitchens
Strategy: Once contact has been established by phone or email, a few members of the group will visit community kitchens. In doing this, we must demonstrate professionalism through our presentation and organization. These group members can ensure a good relationship with the community kitchen partners by creating a plan prior to visiting the sites.
- Organize data from the surveys
Strategy: Create an Excel document to track the collected information from community kitchens. This will allow for effective analysis of the data.
- Complete Blog Post 3
Strategy: Conduct a group meeting to create content for Blog Post 3. Additional tasks for refinement and rubric analysis will be done by each member.
*Communication through Facebook will be key for all upcoming objectives.
Sources
Wujec, T. (2013, June). Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast [Video Podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vS_b7cJn2A