Feeling Dizzy When Riding The ROLLER COASTERS?

Although the fluctuate group showed less dramatic changes in comparison to the others, the graph still indicates some interesting characteristics. The movement of the emotion during some "class events" were similar to the climbers and divers, such as during conflicts between students and faculty, or disagreements between multiple voices in a discussion. When compared with the other graphs, however changes appear to be minor. For example, on the first day of week 2, most people from the fluctuate group also underwent a decrease in emotion. However, it was just a slight decrease that stayed between the range of 8 to 6 points, whereas other groups dropped more dramatically.

One student explained that intense conflicts or disagreements with faculty are more like opportunities and advice to improve oneself. Others were not as surprised about the pop-up conflicts as conflicts are somehow "predictable" - from their perspectives. They expected the journey of the co-design year to be filled with obstacles and they had trained themselves to be well-prepared for the conflicts. The common pattern is that students in this seem more willing and ready to deal with hard issues and they viewed the troubles on the way as opportunities to grow.

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.

The last few days feels like a roller-coaster ride. The first few hours working on our group project brought positive feelings and the proposal seemed promising. But then the lack of communication together with a confusing topic let us go down a spiral and sink to the bottom.

Besides, one student even expressed a different aspect of his/her roller coaster trip. This roller coaster trip is a bumping emotion journey where the student got to experience different feelings throughout the course. The journey, then, is filled with up and down moments like from other graphs; however, these emotions are not likely to adopt a certain trend to grow, and they are a “constant fluctuation of mood”. Furthermore, the student also stated that although, he/she is well-prepared (mentally and physically), the effect of outside elements still construct his/her emotional journey in the course. The factors that affects one's’ journey are the instructors, other peers and teammates during neither a group discussions or a class arguments,

Even though the students in this group tried their best to engage with class discussions and arguments, they rarely found themselves as excited about or as interested in the course as students from the climbers group. One explanation is that since obstacles and conflicts showed up as they had expected, they felt less interests in them and took the experience normal and less dynamic. They also indicated that although the expectation for the course at the very beginning was different, they still kept their responsibility to the course. It did not give them too many down feelings in three weeks as each day, one of them haven't seen much improvements in themselves so the whole journey seems like staying the same for the past three weeks. Thus, because of their expectations for the course were different from the experience they had during the module, they did not experience particularly high or low levels of excitement in comparison to others. For instance, one stated that he/she felt like some discussions were a little bit off topic and not related to the course, making them feel less engaged in the class activities. Personally, this could be understood that some of them did not give off too much of their emotion putting them in a reluctance position.

Overall, most students in the group still saw the positive aspects of "co-designing" rhetoric course as they provided students an opportunity to make their own impact, pushing them to critically think out of the box, keeping them in an active mode but still gave them enough freedom to grow minimal constraints. However, they also expressed their own concerns about the course. One student highly recommend others to be willing to try out the "co-designing" model but still felt uncomfortable with the whole process as some discussions or in-class arguments were exhausting. Another found the structure of co-designing course to be extremely effective, but more guidance from the instructors would be a great way to address vagueness and roadblocks at the beginning.