Prompt: How has the process of planning your individual products and group project been going so far, and how can aspects of Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy inform the work you continue to do?
Planning for my individual projects has started out well. I thought I had some solid ideas off the bat and spoke with part of my group in our unsupervised meeting and they agreed. After that, I didn’t do much apart from just pondering upon what the products may become until I met with Dr. Shea individually as a result of my teammates being sick. To be completely honest, I didn’t have high hopes for this class coming into the semester; so, with that in mind I assumed I’d hate the class. While I’m not completely sold (yet), I do have to say that working with Dr. Shea was actually much more helpful than I thought it would be and she was incredibly helpful with answering my questions to further bring my product ideas to life. Usually, meeting with professors to talk about projects doesn’t do much good for me, but she was able to relate to some of my main focus points and helped me see how I could shape them into detailed and high-quality pieces. After talking for a while, she let me get to work on creating an ‘idea map’ of what I wanted to do. I will include a photo of this below.
In terms of how aspects of Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy inform my work moving forward, I think it could help me keep a perspective of how I approach my work and how I view my previous work. Along with my peers, I often get stuck looking at the bigger picture and psych myself out before I even get started. One of my favorite points from Emergent Strategy that I read is that the bigger picture is always made up of smaller parts and it’s a lot easier for me to look at smaller tasks as doable. I find that if I focus on the small tasks and complete them in a timely manner, that I will look up and realize that I’ve covered a lot of ground. I also think the notion that the quality of relationships is sometimes more important than the quantity of them is super important to keep in mind when reflecting on something like a mentorship program. I may not have connected with every kid, but I do think I had some very solid connections with a couple of them. Sometimes you can’t affect as many people as you like, but if you affect a few in a big way, that may spread from them to others eventually.