Reflection #1 (Due Sunday, February 1 at 11:59 pm): How are you going to revise your work? What secondary sources might you need to explore to bolster your previous research? Who are you writing for and how will that impact your revisions?
Throughout this semester, I plan to revise my previous work by focusing on making the contents consumable by the specific audience of 5th to 8th grade students. My main focus while doing this will be to ensure that while the content is within the reading and understanding range of the age group, no data or important information will be lost in the process of doing so. Secondary sources I might need to explore may include lesson plans or biodiversity/soil/water – based presentation slides that were made by teachers for 5th-8th grade students. This will be both important and useful because I will see what language that will need to be used and how it should be presented to captivate their attention. Another revision I will work on throughout the semester is settling on a distinct plan for how the soil remediation is going to go. In the last semester, I gave multiple different avenues on how to go about remediating the soil, but now I want to settle on one path that will be the most time and cost efficient. Secondary sources I might need to explore for this focus will be the results of remediation in similar environments as well as the general costs of each method. For the information targeted towards 5th-8th grade knowledge, those students are who I’m writing for. Therefore, my revisions will be impacted as I try to make it understandable and something that catches their attention. On the contrary, for the soil remediation, my audience is JJKFAN and their stakeholders. Because of this, the baseline understanding that they have is higher, therefore making my revisions different so that they are professional and informational. Overall, throughout this semester, I will be revising in two distinctly different ways. However, I believe that I will be able to adjust to my audience and what is needed from me to do so efficiently.
Reflection #2 (Due Sunday, February 8 at 11:59 pm): Who do you want your work to reach? Who are the relevant stakeholders, and how do/should they shape your work?
I want my work to reach those who are curious about soil and water research and those who are wanting to remediate their own areas and want to learn how to do that. I believe that everyone should have the ability and availability to learn more about the environment and how to take care of it. With everything that is negatively impacting the environment (global warming, climate change, pollution, etc), it’s hard to find things that are positive and that are helping the environment. That is what makes remediation so powerful and something that everyone should know about. Before this project, I only knew about the concept of remediation as a whole and I knew nothing about phytoremediation specifically. However, through this project I have learned so much and it’s opened my eyes to the good that remediation can bring, not only to the JJKFAN northern campus, but to the world.
The relevant stakeholders for my work are JJKFAN and the 5th-8th grade students at JJKFAN’s academy. They shape my work in two different ways. For the students, they shape my work as I have to adjust and learn how to present my findings to a younger audience. They have different levels of understanding than my other main stakeholder, which is JJKFAN as a whole. They are the ones that are looking for ways to remediate the soil and already have a higher amount of knowledge about the soil and their needs surrounding an end result. Because of this, they shape my work as they are looking for a specific outcome. Therefore, the majority of my work is finding ways to get them that outcome in the most efficient way possible.
Reflection #3 (Due Tuesday, February 24 at 11:59 pm): What is the process of giving and receiving feedback like for you? What can you do to give better feedback and improve how you engage with the feedback you receive from others?
When it comes to giving feedback, I try to understand what the person/group is going for originally. Then, based on that I give feedback that I believe will help them get to their final goal. To continue to give better feedback I think that I will work on making the feedback not as blunt and really explain what I’m talking about to other people. In the past, I feel that I have just taken the wheel on editing or adjusting whatever I’m giving feedback on. I’ve also found that not everyone responds well to blunt feedback and just saying what I think and so I want to work on still saying what needs to be said but maybe delivering the feedback/criticism more gently. However, in the future, I still want to give meaningful feedback but let them take the reins on how they want to act on that feedback.
When receiving feedback, I try to be open minded and accepting of what other people have to say. I feel that I don’t reject feedback altogether and I am open to people giving me feedback and criticisms on my work. One of my downfalls that I have noticed though, is that while I’ll accept the feedback and be respectful of the person/group who is giving me the feedback, I won’t actually put the feedback into action. To approve upon how I engaged with the feedback that I received from others, my main goal moving forward will be to bring my own reservations down a notch so that I’m able to actually accept what other people are telling me. By doing that, I believe that I will be able to act on the feedback that I’m being given and improve my work moving forward rather than just going my own way.