We have finally put together the Sky Team project and it is up and running on the website! The Sky Team will be meeting one last time with the professors before the presentations and before the website goes live to do one last check of subject matter and to prepare for the presentation. I feel confident that we are ready, though. The Sky Team definitely had some rough patches getting to this point, but we were able to push through and get everything done. It is such a relief to get to this point and be able to step back and just appreciate everything that the whole class has accomplished. It is so exciting to see a semester’s worth of hard work finally come to fruition. I love seeing our page within the context of the whole website and side-by-side with the work of the other three teams. I am so very proud of the whole class’s effort, flexibility, and hard work. Furthermore, I am eager to be able to spend time with the majority of these brilliant individuals on our trip to China in January.
The TAs, professors, and other course instructors are working hard behind the scenes to put together the logistics of the website. Shout out to our wonderful library friend Tierney, who has been helping the class and the TAs with the digital aspects technology stuff all semester, including getting the website in working order. With her guidance, the TAs have created our homepage map that will link to each team’s homepage. Additionally, the TAs have done a lot of editing and putting links within the website and things like that. Now, the teams have to worry about their presentations coming up very soon, and everybody else has to worry about perfecting the website for its official induction into the ever-growing field of Silk Road research! So, here we go!

via GIPHY

Uyghur dancing, Urumqi, Xinjiang, Ludo Kuipers, 2014
So the Sky Team had our next to last meeting before the Story Map and accompanying introduction, conclusion, and bibliography pages are put onto the website and finished for Tuesday November 15. I had a bit of a panic moment because before this meeting, the Story Map was empty and the introduction and conclusion were barely started. However, the team worked hard to put up information the night before our weekly meeting. I think that they had mostly everything ready, and they just needed to input information into the Story Map. However, there is still a good bit of writing, editing, and perfecting that needs to happen before this coming Tuesday, including citations. The team plans to meet Monday morning to do any last edits and make sure everything is ready to be seen by the public.
After the teams post their information to the website, the TAs will then begin our part of the project of creating a front page interactive map that has all of the points from each of our teams, which will be linked to each team page, respectively. The TAs will also be involved in writing introduction information about the course and class content and goals overall, as well as making sure the overall look and feel of the website is intuitive and appealing. I think that the TAs’ job will be a good amount of work crammed into a week and a half, but not impossible. All of the TAs are planning to have a get-together where we will input information and have each other there if we have any questions about the technologies we will be using.
The website goes live right after we get back from Thanksgiving break, so it is ideal to have everything done before break, that way we do not have to worry about it. I am very apprehensive about putting all of the class’s work on a public platform where people will be able to read, see, and judge our writing, knowledge base, and technological skills. However, I think that the entire class has done a fantastic job at learning so many new technological skills in such a short time, while simultaneously balancing the readings, quizzes, research, and blog posts for this class (let alone balancing everything outside of this class). I am really very proud of everyone in the class, but I am especially proud of my team in particular. We had a few rough spots where we were frustrated that there was not enough communication, or that we were not moving fast enough with the project. I think in large the rough spots were due to different work habits, which could have been due to the difference in ages within the team. Our team was the only one with an age disparity like ours, with two high school aged students and one adult student in the same group. It made for interesting interactions and team dynamics. There definitely had to be a lot of negotiation and patience from everyone’s side. However, at least up until this point, with the deadline for the project within a few days, I think that the team is feeling more cohesive than ever and I know we can push through and make a great product for the website.
 
 

 
The Sky Team met this past week and we set down definite dates that the group will need to have certain things finished by in order to get the project done on time. Among other things, we set dates for having drafts completed, for setting outlines for the Story Maps, and for inputting information into the website and Story Map. However, I worry that the team is really behind overall. The research is not completely done yet, and we are still unsure how to construct a narrative. I believe that the team should have been more proactive about the project, and the team should have been meeting more often and talking much more often than what has been going on up until this point. We have until November 15 to get everything done by, which is rapidly approaching. My hope is that having set deadlines for each part of the project will get the group to turn it into high gear. At this point, the project will take dedicated time pretty much every day in order to have a finished project that is ready to be seen by the public eye. In order to be proactive and make sure we make the official deadline, we set a deadline for the whole project our on November 11. This will hopefully make sure we really have everything done and give us some elbowroom if something goes wrong and we need those extra three days to fix up the project.
 
Other Worries:
The biggest roadblock right now seems to be the language barrier. It is hard researching the fashion and beauty ideals of a culture that uses a language (or languages) that you do not understand. The team is using all of the resources that we have available, such as Google translations (which can be problematic) and one of our professors who is Chinese and can help us translate some of our artifacts.
Lastly, something that sort of bothers me as the deadline for the project approaches is that the team has not reached out to me for help. I know that they are having some difficulties, but if they do not come and talk to me, there is only so much that I can do in regards to leading them and nudging them along to get stuff done. I am doing the best I can when we meet as a team, but ultimately I cannot force them to do their research, or meet up more, or communicate more.

Sky Team- 9-30-16
Yesterday, the Sky Team met together and the most important things we discussed were the “why” of our research project and the reason our topic was important to research and talk about. We concluded that our topic was important because we have the opportunity to recognize a very under-represented group of peoples (Uyghur women and Uyghur queer individuals). Through the Sky Team’s research, we begin to barely skim the surface of the construction of gender identity and expression of gender minorities in Uyghur communities. We also have to be aware of the intersections of culture, race, time period, etc., that play a huge role in how gender is expressed or repressed. Furthermore, we will be paying close attention to who is writing, talking, taking pictures, filming, etc. when analyzing the research and artifacts.
In relation, I am actively avoiding pretending like our research is going to magically improve the lives of thousands of people and that we are somehow saviors by shining light on this subject and these people. The research encompassed in our project will be in no way an in-depth study. Moreover, we as individuals have to recognize our biases when it comes to writing about a whole other group of people who we know little about. We come from a place where people can more or less (depending on individual situation, of course) talk about gender politics and queer identity—we have the opportunities and language for discussing these things. We need to be aware of how we may be mapping our biases or our language and understanding of the world onto another group of people. Honestly, it is really important for the whole class to remember the lenses that we are looking through when researching and writing about each project topic.
 
Story Maps Tech Lab
In class, we also learned about Story Maps and Time Maps, which are the programs that the teams will be using to create the final project. (The Story Maps and Time Maps will then be linked to the final Silk Road website!) The actual Story Map and Time Map websites do not seem too hard to understand in regards to putting information in, in order to create the final product. However, I do worry about the narrative part for our Story Maps because I am not exactly sure what a narrative looks like in the context of this project. But I am sure that all the teams will get it and understand it once that section of the project is begun.
 
Final Thoughts for This Week
I am nervous for our team in regards to deadlines, and I think some members of the team feel pressure about deadlines as well. We really only have a little over a month to get things done- all of the research, artifact gathering (putting those into shared shelf), and creating the Story Map. The Sky Team seems to be on a good path, and the topic seems to be igniting curiosity and enthusiasm, so I hope that procrastination does not get the best of our group members! Additionally, from talking to other students in the class and reading some other blog posts, I do not think that we are the only ones who feel behind and who are having a slow start to the project. I think that Fall Break will be a great opportunity for the entire class to catch up and move forward with the projects.

Great news for the Sky Team! We discussed our ideas for the project with our professors and finally settled into a topic that is very interesting! I got the feeling after the meeting that the team seemed more invigorated now that we had a more solid direction, or at least I felt a new wave of interest for the topic! Our new direction is looking at contemporary women and queer identities through beauty standards, aesthetics and fashion, and the performative nature of gender, including drag, in the Uyghur peoples of the Xinjiang Province in China. I am actually very excited for this topic, and I hope that the rest of my team is as excited about it as I am! I feel like there is a great avenue for research and learning and analyzing that can be done with the topic that could be really fascinating! The Sky Team will meet again this week to discuss more about research, ideas, and the Story Maps.
 
The only thing I worry about now is making sure our team gets things done in a timely manner. Half of the semester is almost over and we essentially have a month to finish the research, make the Story Maps, gather all of the pictures and documents that we need, and put them on the class website. After that, the TAs have to take the finished Story Maps from all the teams and compile them into a huge map for the front page of the website! But we will see how this week goes, and on into October. I have no doubt my team will get things done, though.  We’ve got this!

This week, the Sky Team was able to meet and discuss the research project, which was very much needed! It turns out that others in the team were feeling the same way I was in regards to communication- or lack thereof. To make amends and move forward, we had a talk as a team about increasing communication within the group so that we can make greater strides for the project. So far, I have noticed a little more communication, so our discussion was successful in that aspect. Besides fixing the communication breakdown, I think at this point, our team is a little overwhelmed with how to best narrow down the research topic. Although everyone is heroically moving forward and doing the best they can with research this weekend, I do notice that there is still a nebulous feeling about our topic. I think that is because our topic is very much centered on ideas and concepts that were created in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, such as gender identity. I fear that it will be much more difficult to find the historical research that we need.
Thankfully, we will be meeting this week with the professors of the course to get help finding a specific area of interest that will be conducive to the scope of the project. Furthermore, to ease stress and make sure we stick to deadlines, we have agreed as a team to have the bulk of the research done by the end of next week so we can begin the story mapping process and collecting “artifacts” (pictures, documents, videos, etc.) that will supplement the overall narrative and research of our topic.
 
Besides working with our teams, everyone in the class has been busy completing the first map test, along with other readings and quizzes. I am very grateful that we were given an extension on the map test (which was supposed to have been due this past week). I would not have been able to finish all of the other work for the course on top of the map test and my work outside of Guilford! I think that this course got off on a little bit of a rocky start because the class was not ready to go from zero to seventy-five on the first day, but I do feel that the class is starting to find a rhythm.

So I guess this is like my first ~official~ blog post. Well, as a TA for the Silk Road course, I do not have a bunch to say about the Silk Road project itself, for my part in the greater project is not until later in the semester. However, there has been a lot going on in regards to other work for the course as well as the Sky Team dynamics, and surprise, surprise, I’m stressing.
 
The Sky Team 9/22/16
The Sky Team is still working on narrowing down on a topic that will 1) have enough research to sustain the scope of the project, 2) be interesting and compelling for everyone in the group, and 3) work within the narrative format that is required for the Story Maps. And it is both frustrating and amazing how difficult it is to come up with a research topic within a group dynamic! I have done several research projects in school, mostly by myself, but I did do some in groups. However, the groups were smaller and we had, what felt like, more structure in terms of prompt and expectation. This Silk Road research project feels gigantic because there is SO MUCH that can be researched. How on Earth do we figure out a specific and narrow topic- a single drop- out of the entire ocean of information?? Hopefully meeting with the professors within the next week will help the team decide on a topic.
 
Also, our team lost a member this week. We are sad to see them go, but I do not think that it will be a huge deal for the project itself because we have not solidified a topic yet. It might make it easier to decide meetings and such as well. Speaking of, it has also been difficult trying to get everyone on the team together and to communicate with each other about the project. Since I am a TA and play more of a mentoring and advisory role, there is only so much that I can do about my team not communicating or talking outside of class and meetings with me. We have started doing weekly meetings all together, so hopefully that will help a little.
 
I think that I am also feeling overwhelmed because I am not actually a part of the research, so it feels out of my hands. But at the same time, I feel a responsibility for my team. Being a TA is like I am sitting outside of my team, in a weird limbo between student and teacher. Needless to say, navigating the role as a TA has been a very challenging part of the course so far! But I’ll get it!

My role on the Sky research team and in the class as a whole is being a TA (a.k.a. Silkworm). The duties that I have as a TA involve acting as a facilitator and mentor to the team, as well as a liaison between my team and the professors of the course, Zhihong Chen and Eric Mortensen. Apart from the teams, I have the role of participating in the class as a student by doing the readings and taking quizzes and tests. Furthermore, I will be working with the other TAs to pull together all of the information (including writings, pictures, documents, etc.) from the teams into one big compilation map of research. In regards to my position as a TA, I believe that I can best assist my team by being available for any questions or concerns that the team might have, as well as doing my best to help resolve those issues, as they arise, in a timely manner. Furthermore, I can help make sure that the team is meeting deadlines and making adequate progress on the research project by checking in on a weekly basis. My biggest apprehension about being a TA is letting go of the control over the research and over the project itself. I have never been in the role of TA, so I will have to learn how to step back and let my group make decisions, but be available for help or direction.
Concerning the course itself, I am excited about physically seeing and experiencing some of the places and cultures that we are learning about this Fall when I attend the study abroad trip to China in January. For instance, it will be interesting to see the different landscapes that helped shape the Silk Road and helped shape the communities that travelled and/or settled on the land. Furthermore, most of the readings and videos for the course have been extremely interesting. I would say that I have enjoyed the documentary “A Thousand Kilometers Beyond the Yellow River,” and the music that we have been exposed to so far, such as Mongolian throat singing and music by Kitaro. I was also intrigued by the article “The Spiritual Identity of the Silk Roads: A Historical Overview of Buddhism and Islam” by Amir H. Zekrgoo because of his discussions about East versus West, and his clear explanation on how new religions form and can be similar to other religions based off of cultural conditions. I think that Zekrgoo’s discussion about East versus West, and the necessity of balance between the two, has many implications that could aid in an inclusive worldview and aid in helpful approaches to everyday life, in small and large matters.
Additionally, I am just so enthusiastic about the content overall in this course. I enrolled in the class Spread of Buddhism Across Asia my final semester at Guilford and I had a wonderful time learning—mainly for the first time—about Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and the cultures surrounding the creation and spread of those beliefs. It was actually the Spread of Buddhism Across Asia course that made me so eager to come back after I graduated to take the Silk Road course specifically. This Silk Road coarse is allowing me to expand and apply the knowledge that I gained from the Spread of Buddhism Across Asia course while learning about many new ideas, religions, peoples, landscapes, interactions, and history.
Although I am extremely enthused about the course and I am very grateful for the opportunity that I have to take the course, there are still aspects of the course that I am nervous about (mainly because I am just a nervous person). Firstly, I am apprehensive about learning all of the technological aspects of the course. I have never done web design or anything of the like, so I wonder how easy it will be for me to pick it up (and then be able to teach others if they need help). Technology is not difficult for me to learn or understand, but it is not automatically intuitive for me, so it takes me a couple of tries to learn and/or figure out. Additionally, I am anxious about the TAs’ responsibilities for the larger research project because it will be a lot of work in a very short amount of time. I worry that it will be difficult to balance those responsibilities with the other work in the course (such as readings and quizzes), as well as to balance personal time and jobs outside of Guilford. As of now, I feel stressed about the amount of work we are all being held accountable for, so I wonder how others are feeling about the workload. Furthermore, I realize that I am a perfectionist as well, so it takes me longer to finish assignments, thus making me worry more about workload! In order to combat my anxiety and slow (but thorough!) work process, I am aiming to organize my time to make myself more efficient. One way that I am planning to organize my time will be by trying to get things for the course done in advance, because I also have to plan around jobs and for personal time.
Overall, I have noticed the theme of balance arising within this semester for myself, so I will embrace this opportunity to learn how to healthily maintain equilibrium mentally, emotionally, and physically while I strive to do the best that I can in this course and in the rest of my life as well. I will strive to focus on balance and see how that affects my stress and worry. I am so ready to learn more about a part of the world that I do not know a lot about and to hopefully help educate others down the road. It is daunting to think of how little I know about so many other peoples and cultures in the world, but I will do my best to learn what I can in the time I am given with an open mind and open heart.