Week 14

Week 14 | 04/04/16 - 10/04/16

Personal & Professional

I cannot believe that I am already writing about week two for placement. Time really does fly when you are having fun (cliché I know). On Monday Morning, we had a meeting with Peter and our tutor Marie first thing, to start putting together some ideas for our activity. As the meeting progressed, we started to plan in more detail. Ana, Cristina and I decided that we would use the tool of diversity within the school to be our backbone for our activity. This would also incorporate democracy. However, as each of us come from very different back grounds professionally, we found it difficult in the beginning to work efficiently as a team. As Ana and Cristina are both completing their masters and have a lot more experience with adults than I have, I found it quite challenging to get my points across due to my inexperience. It soon became clear to me that I wanted to make this a personal goal for myself to work on and improve. As the week progressed, I learned a lot from Ana and Cristina and our group dynamics when working together was something I hadn't experienced before.

'Good design begins with honesty, asks tough questions, comes from collaboration and from trusting your intuition' (Freeman Thomas).

In relation to working as part of a team with Ana and Cristina, we used a model which I found extremely useful – the Walt Disney model (1994). Based on what we observed in the first week we agreed on the idea of an international day. We aimed to use the tool of diversity within the school as a way of bringing people together, as some of the students in the school feel excluded from society, we wanted to create a sense of belonging. The students in the school accounted for more than 20 different nationalities and this was something we wanted to promote and celebrate. We used the phrase 'everyone is unique, but everyone is the same'. During this week, we also set up two meetings with two different social workers and talked with them for almost two hours on two different occasions. This was very beneficial as the information was reliable and first-hand and we were extremely grateful for them taking their time to talk with us.

During the week, we also talked with the students and tried to get their opinions as much as possible as we were providing the activity for them and so we wanted to find out their interests to make the activity as interesting as possible. We got to know the students more and heard some of their stories about their personal life. I was also interested to research if this type of organisation was heard of back home.

Also, during my second week, I feel as though my personal learning was being developed, for example how to approach adults experiencing difficulties. Some students didn’t want to talk and this was something I had to be aware of. Kofoeds Skole challenged me in many ways and this is just one example. Another example, in relation to professional learning was having to work as part of a team that wasn’t really functioning. During my professional career, I will work with many professionals that I have to co-operate with and learning to never give up is something Kofoeds Skole taught me.

Reference - http://www.designorate.com/disneys-creative-strategy/ - BY RAFIQ ELMANSY · 04/06/2015