Choosing group research topics always tends to be a painful and messy process – it’s hard enough as an individual – so I was very pleasantly surprised by how smooth the ordeal was for our group. From the outset, we all had similar foci in mind for the project; if I’m not mistaken, I believe everyone in the group had written something about gender/female/queer identity on our initial interest cards. Since all three sort of go hand-in-hand, it wasn’t hard to hone down that portion of our topic. The rest (time period, geographic distribution, and other unifying links) took a little bit of work to finesse, but it wasn’t anything particularly difficult. We were all very willing to focus in on the western parts of the Silk Road, and once we had that down, we bounced off of instructor suggestions to settle our focus on the 18^th-20^th centuries, as well as unifying our entire research question under our individual topics’ relations to Islam. We’re currently looking at designating a specific interest to each group member for our individual research, which we’ll then bring together and connect to one another’s topics (using Islam as a parameter throughout the research so that we’ll actually be able to connect what we have). None of our individual topics are completely unrelated to the rest, either – I’m focusing on queer identity and its relation to Islam, another member is looking at racial identity through the same lens, and other group members are looking at the various facets of female existence in the region and time period we chose.
My individual role within the group has become that of the timekeeper. Personally, I’m very happy to have this role – I’m terrible in public speaking situations, so had that fallen on me the group likely would have suffered as a whole. Similarly, while I’m usually good in leadership roles, it’s harder for me to bring out my assertive side and tell people to pull themselves together when I’m not already close to the people I’m working with; while it wouldn’t have been catastrophic, we might have gotten off to a rocky start had I ended up the facilitator. Timekeeper works out far better, as it allows me to fill a leadership-type role without necessarily needing to chew people out. Instead, I’ll be working to figure out some preliminary due dates for the various pieces of our project and monitoring where people are in their work so that dates can be adjusted to better fit our team’s progress.
Given how well everyone’s interests within Team Sky aligned, I’m not expecting too many issues to arise due to team dynamics. We’re all on the same page (at least so far) about where we’re taking our research and final product, and we’ve worked to build a research topic that would allow everyone some wiggle room to pursue their own specific interests. Everyone has been quite supportive of one another, and everyone wanted to ensure that no one’s interests were edged out in refining our topic. Additionally, I think we’ve all been given roles within the group that will play to our abilities and benefit how we work together. We were lucky in that Teiji feels comfortable in a public speaking role, and that covers what tends to be one of the shakiest parts of any project. Jamie was on top of notes during the class activities we’ve done so far, so she definitely seems like a great pick for our group’s recorder, and Elise is serving as facilitator and ensuring that we don’t unravel at the seams – I’m already good friends with her, so I know that should conflict arise she’ll definitely be able to diffuse any tensions and find a suitable solution.
That said, I’m not entirely without concerns for our final product. My personal interest within our topic is queer identity; belonging to the queer community, it’s a topic that I have a personal hold in and I initially chose to focus on it because I figured my connection to it would keep me invested and help bring out the best of what I have to give. Even so, I’m worried that it might end up falling through due to a lack of sources. When we were narrowing down our time period, we deliberately chose a more modern time-frame so that we’d hopefully have more luck in finding information for both myself and some of the other more specified interests that other group members had. I’m still worried in spite of this, though. I have a backup focus should queer identity fall through (the role of femininity in religious ritual), but I hope that I don’t lose some steam if I ultimately need to make that switch.
I also want to say that I think that the way the teams for this project were initially chosen was a fantastic system. One of my biggest anxieties with group projects is simply finding a group to join; it takes me awhile to get comfortable enough so that I can really interact with new people and not have it be awkward, so if we had been told to figure out teams ourselves I likely would have ended up in a group with a topic I wasn’t interested in and knowing myself I probably would have been too uncomfortable to say anything. By having the instructors attempt to pair us based on our interests, that anxiety was cut out, and while I can’t speak for others, it certainly benefited me.
As for my performance within the team and within the class so far, I’d say I’ve been pulling my weight. It’s hard to truly assess that at this point since we’ve barely done that much of anything, but I haven’t been neglecting any work and I’ve been looking into some potential sources that might aid in our research. I tried to be active in the narrowing of our topic and I gave suggestions for how other group members could incorporate their primary interests into our final product. If this reflection were due a week or two later I’m sure I’d have more to say, but that’s about it up until now.