Update on Project Activities This week, we focused largely on internal organization and completing existing projects. During class on Wednesday, we mapped out various project deliverables, talked about the timeline for project completion, and plan for some of the upcoming projects we have to work on. From internal conversations, we decided that this week would be dedicated to completing chapter memo’s and having final conversations with authors about our feedback, and we set a hard deadline of 11:59 P.M. on Friday night for those to be sent out. We also decided to work on the first draft of the grant narrative over Thanksgiving Break, and we plan to have a zoom call on the November 23 to discuss and finalize our first draft. Given that we’ve previously divided sections and pulled existing grant language, we see this as a step in both synthesizing and producing new “pitches” of the AEMP project. We intend to send this draft to the AEMP team on November 23, and request that if they would like any additional work done on the narrative, that it be returned to us by November 29. Week 9 we plan to dedicate to the development of educational materials, and we hope to sent a first iteration of what some of these might look like on November 29. From here, we hope to begin working on both revising educational materials and making final edits to the grant narrative prior to the December 5 deadline. Finally, week 10 we will dedicate to the production of the final paper and powerpoint in preparation for the Human Cities Expo! This week, we also familiarized ourselves with the presentation space at the d.school, and tried to get a sense of how we would divide up content during the presentation. While we have yet to make any final decisions, we’ve begun to discuss which areas we feel most comfortable with, and which topics are most important for us to cover in the exposition. Finally, meeting as a team on Wednesday, we discussed some of the possible educational materials, and tried to come to a better understanding of what was being asked of us. After emailing some of the folks at AEMP, we settled on a list of several potential resources, including: Interactive Worksheets, Basic Concepts/Fact Sheets, Vocabulary Sheets, Sample Discussion Questions for groups and pair-shares, and Sample Activities like Individual Community Power Maps and discussion about home values. In the meantime, each of us have begun working on a list of topics, thematic ideas, and infographics that could be effective when used as a teaching tool for younger audiences. We hope to begin settling on these ideas and dividing up work at the beginning of next week. What We Observed and Learned This week, we learned the importance of planning ahead and setting small deadlines in order to meet our project goals. With 2.5 weeks remaining in the quarter, and a number of deliverables still remaining (several of the chapter memos, the NEH grant, educational materials, campus activism resources, and a potential oral history), we were feeling stressed about finishing everything on time. However, on Wednesday (11/14), we sat down as a group and mapped out the rest of the quarter, giving ourselves internal deadlines throughout the rest of the quarter. We also decided on when and how we would continue to check-in with Magie, Erin, Mary, Adrienne, and Deland. After dedicating about 30 minutes to this organizational mapping, we feel much more confident in our abilities to get everything done. Below is an image of the plan we developed for ourselves. We have also learned the importance of on-going, earnest communication. As a group of five, working with an even larger collective, it is incredibly important that we are all aware of and respectful of each other’s time commitments, and that we understand what is expected of us as individuals. Although it can be tempting to “bite off more than we can chew,” especially because we are all very excited about the work we are doing, we have learned that we can and should be honest if we do not feel that we can reasonably accomplish what we originally set out to do. For example, at the beginning of the quarter, we were excited about completing an oral history with Stanford employees. However, given our time restraints and ethical concerns about not being able to develop a mutually beneficial relationship with a Stanford worker, we have decided to scale down this aspect of this project to and instead compile a list of resources that could serve as a starting point for a future project on campus housing activism.
Critical Analysis/Moving Forward A key strategy we will be using as we move forward and finish our project will be to use, as much as possible, to using in existing material to complete the grant and educational material. The AEMP, founded in 2013, has been doing research on the Bay Area housing crisis for 5 years and have produced a number of maps, collected dozens of oral histories and written articles about the various social justice dimensions of housing and transport. In producing our educational materials we will distill key content from each of the chapters and present it in a simple and accessible way. Additionally, we’ll try to incorporate maps into the educational materials so students can reach their own conclusions about obvious trends in gentrification happening in redlined neighborhoods and happening disproportionately to people of color. Another idea we planned to execute is compiling a list of key terms and policies so students reading the educational materials can be informed about the forces at play contributing to inequities in the system. We are looking to inspire conversations among students utilizing educational material that mirror our conversations about transportation in class on Monday of this week. People brought their own experiences of public transportation and had clear suggestions about how integrating transit networks and lowering fares could improve the experience on the whole. Similar to how our class read Schafran’s history of public transportation in the Bay Area, which helped to explain the systems present failures, we hope providing a brief history of housing, transport, infrastructure, public health and such will increase students understanding of these issues, contextualize their frustration with current issues and be empowered to work towards change. Drawing particular attention to successful public collective action in changing policy would be greatly impactful. Similarly, with the grant we plan to use language that AEMP has already used for previous winning grant application and adapt it for our purposes. Having a good amount of in depth knowledge of the Atlas and the motivations of the project we feel adequately prepared to write a convincing narrative. The fact that the Atlas is a collaborative project with interdisciplinary study makes it a great candidate for the grant. Comments are closed.
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