Struggling up Mountain with The CLIMBERS

Throughout the intense and crisis-prone process of co-designing, we found a group of climbers. They might have kicked off their journey with a positive vibe or not, but all had to go through several “accidents” while climbing. The special identifying characteristic of the climbers is that even in their lowest emotional moment, they always find the bright side to look at, and recover from drowning in the sea.

There are two main groups of the climbers, one started the course with the super high mood level, went through some downs and got on up track again, the other group did not have their greatest emotional level at the beginning, then gradually went up.

“After the first two days of Rhetoric, I can say with utmost confidence this class has already solidly landed in my top 5 favorite learning experiences. Never have I thought an hour-long in class discussion could be so genuinely captivating.

Some students’ significant low emotion status at the beginning of the course was because of their initial expectations. Most of us attended the course with the position of half-student, half-codesigner, waited to learn new things and give feedback on it. Apparently, we were absolutely wrong, and this misconception had a clear impact on students’ feelings for the first few days.

“I stepped in Rhetoric course with the expectation to study about writing and speaking. However, on the second day, KinHo and Pam woke the whole class up to remind us that we are Co-designers, and what Co-designers were expected to do is contributing to designing the course. We recognized that it requires much more than just going to class and doing homework.”

Just because they are c

limbers do not mean that they have no down period, crisis, or have never been hit by a roadblock. Their feelings went down mainly at the same time as the class, which was the first day of week 2, when we encountered a tense and tough discussion about what-to-do in our course.

“The first day of this week was an extremely terrible day to me. We were stuck in the class’s goals and schedule for the next day. After the intense discussion and presentation, the class left me totally exhausted and lost.”

Another big factor that affected climbers’ mood was the group work in week 2 and the beginning of week 3 as there are several downtrends during this time. As a student said “The thought of restructuring the project terrified me. I couldn’t remember precisely if it was Monday or Tuesday, but when KinHo pointed out our lacking in conciseness, it was clear to me it was necessary to rebuild the proposal. It stressed me, and I believe the others were quite affected too.”

What made the climbers different was that they were like springs. The more they were compressed, the more powerful they bounced back. If they failed to hold one specific rock to climb up and balance, it was ok as they found another way to continue going up the mountain, climbing to the brighter side. The climbers are the ones who found the positive lens to look at the obstacles.

“Although to now everything is still vague, at least I feel like we had a concrete base and no matter what we are doing in the next few weeks, I believe that we are heading to the same destination, to the right one.”

“Even though the bigger size of this class made me feel quite overwhelmed, I really like our discussion and debate [...] Thanks to that, I learned that each type has its own pros and cons.”

The sentence or paragraph structure that the climbers often used were the contradictory methodology “Although…, I believe…”, “Even though…, I really like…”, as they seemed to be able to look at both sides of every problem and enjoy dealing with it and figuring a way to go over it.

“As a result, when a seemingly insurmountable obstacle of building a Rhetoric course arose, I feared of seeing myself giving up on this adaptive challenge. To my pleasant surprise, not only I decide to confront the obstacle, I also become more intrigued and passionate with Fulbright like never before.”

And to somehow sum up the general trends and stories of the climbers, this sentence might be fit: “Cheers to all the frustrating moments during the course and “keep swimming”!”