With the project approaching to the end, this is our last blog posting. In the following blog, we will conclude our reflection of West Point Grey Legion exploration journey during this term and moments of significance. Although, we encountered several problems in the process, we spent a fun period of time on this project and we hope you enjoy reading our final blog as much as we did working with the community!

Moment of Significance

After the first visit to the legion, we conducted a second visit to West Point Grey legion with questions that we have that needs further clarification. The second visit to the legion could be said as a major turning point in our finding because we learned that the legion is having a renovation in near future. The legion expressed its eagerness in implementation of a kitchen infrastructure to improve their current food system. However, week after the visit to the legion, we heard back through email how the renovation proposal are not making any progress specifically regarding the implementation of kitchen infrastructure.

What?

Through the past almost 10 weeks that we’ve been working on the project, our group has experienced different big and small difficulties. The most crucial problem that we encountered in this project is the fact that we couldn’t form a constructive comment or suggestion for the legion regarding their food system. With the current food system that the legion has, our position is to provide what we thought would be the best solution. As the communicator to connect the legion’s goal and Vancouver Food Strategies’ goal, we formulated suggestions such as linking the legion to neighboring restaurants. However, after the visits and hearing the renovation plan of wanting to have a kitchen from the legion’s vice president, we were again lost on which direction of suggestion to provide. We would say that the visits to the legion updated us on what’s happening within the system of legion, but it doesn’t provide us future insight on the food system of the legion yet.

So What?

Despite the hard time of accomplishing the goal, which is forming a constructive suggestion for the legion’s current food system, we accomplished many other tasks along our way of working together. For example, we completed the interview as a team and shared what we learned to each other.  We contributed ideas when preparing our final infographics and had fun with our creativities when building it. We also handled the pressure and thought of a plan B together when receiving news of how the legion’s kitchen building proposal is not making a progress. Just as Lee S. Shulman has stated, “In professional education, it is insufficient to learn for the sake of knowledge and under- standing alone; one learns in order to engage in practice.” We would never accomplish these tasks by understanding, rather, we learned through practicing. Through practicing, we learned to cooperate with team members better, we learned to respond or react better when facing unexpected circumstances, we also learned to respect and appreciate everyone that is involved in the project. Therefore, the final result is not the most important matter. What matters the most is what we have learned along the way.

Now What?

An interview was conducted with the vice president, Ron, this week to gather more detailed information regarding the renovation of the legion. Our role in this interview was to extract any useful information that may help us to determine which direction can our future research continue on. Moreover, research regarding the current situation of the legion is required to make and support any constructive suggestion.             

Reference:

Shulman, L. S. (2005). Pedagogies of uncertainty. Liberal Education, 91(2), 18–25. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ697350.pdf      

Weekly Objectives Oct23rd-Nov2nd

• Visit West Point Grey Legion on Oct 26th.
• Conduct Interviews with manager and member of the Legion
• Draw knowledge, skills and experiences graph
• Finish Blog Posting #3

Achievement

• 2nd visit to the Legion on Oct 26th
• Interviewed Vice President
• Interviewed a volunteer
• Finished knowledge, skills and experiences graph

MOMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE CHANGE

In the class tutorial, we had a chance to reflect on the past experience we had working with the community. The reflection of the experience was depicted through a graph with our experience of life and class throughout the visits up till now.

Experience Graph 

Before visiting the legion, all of us in the group were still a bit confused about the project itself and how the visit would turn out to be. As a result, our emotion fell a little before our first visit to the legion. Uncertainty is inevitable in our further career; however, it could propel people to find better resolution (Shulman, 2005, p. 18). After the first visit to the legion, our emotion reached its first peak because of the abundance of information about understanding the environment that we received and what expectation we are going to achieve (Hornby, T., & Bleed, R. 2006). With the information, we were able to further understand the community that we would be working with better since local group nearby usually does community services. As time passes, the knowledge we received from the first visit to the legion can’t seem to answer to further question we came up with. Therefore, our emotion gradually decreased because further questions, blogs, outlines, and reports that’s due for LFS class. The midterm seasons is what brought the emotion to its lowest point. Post midterm seasons, our group’s emotion gradually increased and the team’s emotion finally reached its second peak after the second visit to the Legion. Till this day, we are working in a group in hope to learn more about the legion with reasonable resolutions that may benefit the West Point Grey Legion.

Through the experience, we found that working with the community and balancing time managing with each of our member’s personal lives could be tough. However, with the positive feedbacks and experience we learned each time after visiting the legion and having class lessons, our group looks forward in learning more about the community in near future.

STRATEGIES FOR GRACEFUL DISMOUNT

To successfully achieve as a group, it requires hard work of people collaborating and putting knowledge with effort together. This graceful dismount requires us to self-reflect on the paths we’ve currently experienced so we can reflect and further improve in future visits.

“Listening” is also a key point to success in our community project as discussed in Ernesto Sirolli’s TED talk video (2012). While we were struggling about not having a kitchen in our Legion, the first thing we thought of is how to make up rather than listen to the Legion’s will. Through our second visit to the Legion and interviewed Vice President of the Legion, we tried to listen to what the Legion wants and able to formulate our next steps. Being able to understand the community West Point Grey more, our group believes that the idea of community kitchen doesn’t only pertain to whether if the Legion itself does or does not physically have a kitchen, but whether if the Legion’s food system itself ties to the community’s food systems.

We’ve learned through visits to West Point Grey legion about how the Legion prefers to have a kitchen but doesn’t currently have one. From this starting point, if West Point Grey’s current renovation plan includes implementing a new kitchen within the Legion, then the Legion would be able to provide a better food system with bursary from chain store supermarkets. If not, some upcoming strategies such as helping the Legion connect with close by kitchens within restaurants for regular or even contracted meal plan collaborations could be a possible solution toward a better food system for the Legion.

Reference

Hornby, T., & Bleed, R. (2006, May). WORK AND LIFE: ACHIEVING A REASONABLE BALANCE. Retrieved November 6, 2016, from http://www.educause.edu/research-and-publications/books/cultivating-careers-professional-development-campus-it

Shulman, L. S. (2005). Pedagogies of uncertainty. Liberal Education, 91(2), 18–25. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ697350.pdf

Sirolli, E. (2012, November 26). Ernesto Sirolli: Want to help someone? Shut up and listen [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chXsLtHqfdM

UPCOMING OBJECTIVES AND STRATEGIES   Oct17th-Oct23rd

Our upcoming objective is to prepare a second visit to the Legion and gather information using inquiry questions from the proposal. In order to achieve this, we will send email to the administrator of the Legion for a request for our second visit, as well as a face-to-face interview. We will go in as a group, where each members will be assigned different jobs such as taking note and asking question during the interview. Moreover, we will keep in contact with all group members to ensure that all members are updated as the project progresses.

As a group, we plan on experiencing events that would be occurring in the legion. Therefore, we will visit the legion together as guests for the events. The purpose is to get to understand the operations of legion events and how it relates to their food system. We hope that this experience could bring us further insight into the legion’s system which would help us tie back to knowledge learned either in class or from readings.

Throughout the first six weeks, we have been together working as a small “family” depending on and cooperating with each other in order to satisfy and accomplish our objectives. Although we encountered difficulties that didn’t meet our expectations while working together, we continued and will remain to strive for better works in near future. Our goal to achieve in this project does not depend on making every assignment perfect, but to conquer each challenge we encountered and learn from each failure. From past six weeks, we learned that we still have many areas needed to be improved in order to maximize the dynamics and specialities for each member. As a group, we look forward to persisting in attaining our objectives with our strength, perseverance and cooperation.

MOMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE REFLECTION

What?

The members in this West Point Grey Legion group was assigned randomly with some members working together for the first time. Since everyone came from different backgrounds, our group encountered communication issues. This lack of communication with one of the members lead us to realize the importance of listening and reaching out to each other on either school work or how each group member participates in different tasks.

So What?

This tells us the importance of appropriate communication in teamwork in order to have a group working together cooperatively. In our case, we learned to listen to other people’s ideas and made sure that everyone were available during group meetings. Other than understanding the importance of communication, team dynamic plays a significant role on working efficiently (West 2012). Each member are specialized in different tasks, therefore, we will try to evenly distribute work to maximize the quality of our work.

Now what?

For future reference, our group has decided to meet up outside of classroom so all of us can communicate face to face. We will make sure that every member is assigned with an important role that maximize people’s ability in different tasks. When starting each work, we will take a close overview of the project content and divide the work loads evenly before separating. Whenever a member encounters problems or has questions, the whole team will help out to solve the problem together. We all agreed on to reply messages within the day someone posted the question so we can be on task. With the current strategies we have aiming to try to solve problems that may occur during heavy workload, we would also reflect among ourselves on how works are done every week to seek for improvements.

Reference

Rolfe et al.’s (2001) reflective model. (n.d.). Retrieved October 12, 2016, from http://my.cumbria.ac.uk/Public/LISS/Documents/skillsatcumbria/ReflectiveModelRolde.pdf

West, M. A. (2012). Effective teamwork: Practical lessons from organizational research (3rd; 3 ed.). Malden, MA; Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley.

Weekly Objectives  Oct10th-Oct16th

• Meet up with group mates to finish blog post #2
• Communicate more with group members
• Send a interview request email to West Point Grey Legion
• Summarize our teamwork in our proposal report
• Planned to visit legion during their event on October 22nd
• Organized the interview questions in preparation for the second visit to legion

Achievement

• Met up with group member to finish Blog #2
• Got a lot of communication within our group
• Completed proposal report
• Decided on a date for our second visit
• Sent request email to the Legion’s administrator

Project Proposal

The proposal outlined our ideas on this project after visiting West Point Grey Legion as a group. This includes what we observed and what we proposed for our future visits.