{"id":301,"date":"2016-09-13T02:20:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-13T06:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dev-the-digital-silk-road.pantheonsite.io\/?p=301"},"modified":"2016-09-13T02:20:00","modified_gmt":"2016-09-13T06:20:00","slug":"initial-reflective-post-nathan-g","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/team-sky\/initial-reflective-post-nathan-g\/","title":{"rendered":"Initial Reflective Post – Nathan G."},"content":{"rendered":"

Choosing group research topics always tends to be a painful and messy process \u2013 it\u2019s hard enough as an individual \u2013 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\u2019m 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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 18th<\/sup>-20th<\/sup> centuries, as well as unifying our entire research question under our individual topics\u2019 relations to Islam. We\u2019re currently looking at designating a specific interest to each group member for our individual research, which we\u2019ll then bring together and connect to one another’s topics (using Islam as a parameter throughout the research so that we\u2019ll actually be able to connect what we have). None of our individual topics are completely unrelated to the rest, either \u2013 I\u2019m 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.
\nMy individual role within the group has become that of the timekeeper. Personally, I\u2019m very happy to have this role \u2013 I\u2019m terrible in public speaking situations, so had that fallen on me the group likely would have suffered as a whole. Similarly, while I\u2019m usually good in leadership roles, it\u2019s harder for me to bring out my assertive side and tell people to pull themselves together when I\u2019m not already close to the people I\u2019m working with; while it wouldn\u2019t 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\u2019ll 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\u2019s progress.
\nGiven how well everyone\u2019s interests within Team Sky aligned, I\u2019m not expecting too many issues to arise due to team dynamics. We\u2019re all on the same page (at least so far) about where we\u2019re taking our research and final product, and we\u2019ve 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\u2019s interests were edged out in refining our topic. Additionally, I think we\u2019ve 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\u2019ve done so far, so she definitely seems like a great pick for our group\u2019s recorder, and Elise is serving as facilitator and ensuring that we don\u2019t unravel at the seams \u2013 I\u2019m already good friends with her, so I know that should conflict arise she\u2019ll definitely be able to diffuse any tensions and find a suitable solution.
\nThat said, I\u2019m not entirely without concerns for our final product. My personal interest within our topic is queer identity; belonging to the queer community, it\u2019s 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\u2019m 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\u2019d hopefully have more luck in finding information for both myself and some of the other more specified interests that other group members had. I\u2019m 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\u2019t lose some steam if I ultimately need to make that switch.
\nI 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\u2019t 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\u2019t speak for others, it certainly benefited me.
\nAs for my performance within the team and within the class so far, I\u2019d say I\u2019ve been pulling my weight. It\u2019s hard to truly assess that at this point since we\u2019ve barely done that much of anything, but I haven\u2019t been neglecting any work and I\u2019ve 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\u2019m sure I\u2019d have more to say, but that\u2019s about it up until now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Choosing group research topics always tends to be a painful and messy process \u2013 it\u2019s hard enough as an individual \u2013 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\u2019m not mistaken, I believe … Continue reading Initial Reflective Post – Nathan G.<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-team-sky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ds.guilford.edu\/projects\/silkroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}