The biggest take away from this week’s session was the way our actions and sometimes, inability to act, can either positively or negatively impact ourselves and the communities around us.
Weekly Objectives + Achievements
We have now completed all our interviews! It has been a very exciting process and we are glad to have gathered all our footage by the end of October, giving us all of November to focus on making the video. During this upcoming week, we are utilizing our flexible learning period to get together and discuss how we are actually going to make the video. We have a large amount of footage (hours and hours of it…) that we need to go through. During our group meeting, we will discuss what ideas we want to highlight in our video, and use this as criteria to choose which clips are significant to include. We plan to string these clips together in a specific order to create a story within our video. This will help to maximize the influence of our video. We are excited to start this creative process.
Reflection on the Moment of Significant Change workshop
For our tutorial activity during this week (week 9), we did a “Moment of Significant Change” workshop as a group to reflect on our experiences and to identify the significant moments that have occurred in our project so far. We began by each individual member creating their own graph similar to the one below and shortly after came together as a group to share what was significant to us individually. While each member shared their graph, we noticed that we all had felt that our community partner meetings, the Vancouver Food Summit, and our recent experiences in interviewing and video taking process were common moments of significant change, supplemented with the gradual increase in knowledge from our class lectures. However, during this group discussion some members pointed out that within the category of “knowledge” they see it both as knowledge gained from our lectures as well as knowledge gained on the details of Sustenance Festival and our project. The trajectory of each knowledge differed for every week, and as a group we decided to depict that difference through making two categories of moments of significant change in our knowledge – “course knowledge” and “project knowledge”.
From the graph below, it seems that our course knowledge increased over time in a linear pattern. This is because concepts that were introduced during the beginning of the term were further understood when we were working on our community project. During week one and two, we learned about uncertainty and asset based community development. Two concepts that we got to apply during our first community partner meeting during flexible learning week. Our group agreed that the lectures on complex topics like gender, white privilege and indigenous food sovereignty were incredibly inspiring and made us reflect on our roles in the betterment of our communities. They also helped all of us in structuring our AER paper. Our group was in consensus with regards to moments of significant change both in class and our project, as well skills gained throughout the term that complemented both these areas.
However, for moments of significant change in our emotions, we did not all have similar feelings with regards to moments such as our 1st community partner meeting. While some members felt that they left with great uncertainty, others left the meeting with feelings of excitement and inspiration.
Our strategies for a successful project completion:
Time Management
With the semester drawing to a close and with many other due dates fast approaching, being able to manage and prioritize our time as a group would be an important aspect for the successful completion of this project. We will need to discuss and plan out when and how often to meet as a group to work on the remainder of the project – including discussing the structure of the video, looking through the footage that we have, and finally producing a 5-10 minute long video.
Technical Support
The last segment of our project – putting together the final video, will be something new for all of us in the group as we have relatively no experience in film-making and video production. Hence, we will be scheduling a meeting with the LFS Learning Centre to receive advice on which software to use and how to go about putting together the different clips and producing a final quality video.
Feedback from our Community Partner
As we decide on our weekly goals, it is also extremely crucial that there is leniency in time as we take into account receiving feedback from our community partners and the necessary changes that will need to be made. This will be an important step to ensure that the video we create is an accurate representation of the message they want to bring across.