HOW WE FEEL ABOUT THIS PERFECTLY WILD EXPERIENCE
A great deal of importance was put on documenting the emotions of the 20 participants.
From low to medium to high stakes writings, where the amount of public sharing varied, but were mostly centered around our thoughts and feelings towards topics discussed and the course, to weekly reflections as well as daily feedbacks. As this course came to a close, we set out to build a visual journey, one capturing emotions in an image, and arrived at this webpage, and the product below.
We sent out a review form for each member and asked them to rate their days on a scale from 1 (extremely bad mood) to 10 (extremely good mood). Alongside the weekly reflection we gathered from the class, we set out to identify and analyze the shifts in emotions and the reasons behind them. And thus, born out of 3 weeks of intense building and learning, we have the grand emotion journey chart.
“You should feel like you are swimming in information.”, said Pam. And trust us, we are.
Overall, the co-designers participating in the constructing the Rhetoric course divided into three major trends, named in honor of the “perfectly wild” experience we went through together: the climbers, the divers, and the roller coasters. Considering the survey conducted on our individual “Emotional Journey” , the major trends differ as below.
“WE PRESENT TO YOU: THE EXTREME SPORTS”
The climbers showed a general inclination to their emotional scores after their entire experience. Albeit the ratings of their general mood dipped during the process, quite drastically on two occasions, they leave the course with as high, or higher, mood scores from the beginning.
The divers, on the other hand, leave the course with a lower emotional score than that of before. They too experienced fluctuation within the weeks but show barely any strong improvements in mood scoring. The decline was gradual, and showed few improvement points
The roller coasters experience what could be said “the best of both worlds”. Their journey, too, has its highs and lows, but rather than showing a clear incline or decline of scoring, their scores indicate no strong trends, but rather a constant fluctuation of mood.
There are 4 similarities, or lack thereof, that is of considerable importance. These aspects are shown below.
The mood scores took a particularly sharp decrease among all students on Monday of the second week. According to student reviews, this was mainly due to Monday blues, as well as the sudden, not to mention very intense workload presented right after the weekends. Also, there was quite an intense discussion on how to proceed with the course, lasting beyond an hour, where, in Pam’s words, everyone’s eyes were sort of “glazed over”. This was the course’s very first major hiccup.
In contrast to this, there was a steep increase in mood right in the next day (Week 2, Tuesday). This was attributed to the fact we were able to readjust our approaches towards the project, having disregard previous Friday’s rubric. It was a stroke of good luck and progress, and everyone was hit with a sudden sense of optimism. This was also the day we got to choose our proposal topics, which lead to enthusiastic participation.
Within the span from Week 2’s Thursday to Week 3’s Tuesday, students’ mood remained generally consistent. This may be due to the similarity of student activity. In this time period, the day generally progressed as low-stakes writing, quick mini read-out, assistant workshops, to group work. The run-of-the-mill feeling generated sort of calm buzz around the class, and mood scores generally plateaued.
There was one separation of feelings on the Thursday of Week 1 that is not shown clearly in the chart. However, according to feedback, students either felt very motivated or quite discouraged on this day. We received feedback from both KinHo and Pam that they were displeased with our expectations of the course, and this was when we consolidated the “co-designing” purpose of this course. Considering the fact that we all were expecting to attain knowledge rather than actually constructing something, this left us all pleasantly surprise, or confusedly stunned.