Reflecting, Sharing, Learning

Reflecting, Sharing, and Learning is to be embedded throughout your project, in how you think and report about your work. Here, we discuss one way for doing so.

Writing About Project Process through Scenes & Acts

Writing about project process provides teams a way to reflect on and share with others lessons drawn from the way in which your project develops over time. Project Process reporting represents an approach to IQP execution and community development rooted in the complexities of working closely with diverse groups of people in ways that seek to share as fruitfully as possible the process of defining the project’s goals and working procedures in ways that benefit all involved – “shared action learning!”

These complexities place heavy demands on students to continually process a rich set of ideas, impressions, and inputs from many different people — that is, to connect, plan and act in concert with others, all the while observing what’s happening (or what conditions exist, etc.) in order to reflect, share, and learn before taking the next steps in project development. Capturing this rich process in close to real time is challenging, but essential to understanding and moving in rhythm with complex community dynamics. In order to help you do this effectively and efficiently, we propose a metaphor of improvised “Scenes” as a way for carving out discrete chunks of project experience for productive analysis.

Intense interpersonal project dynamics don’t emerge just in Cape Town, of course. They start on campus as students confront the exciting but at times daunting prospect of conducting background research and learning to work with teammates, advisors and others to prepare for a deep cross-cultural experience that contributes meaningfully to oneself and others. The Project Process elements of the website will be developed as the team processes their project experience by writing structured scenes about key project experiences or activities as they occur. On a weekly basis, the team will summarize and reflect on the scenes and other project developments of the week as an “Act” in the larger project, just as scenes constitute Acts in a play or other theatrical performance.

Please read carefully the attached guidance for putting these theatrical metaphors to good use in your project.

Scene Reporting Guidance

ACT webpage Guidance

Scene Example: Sponsor Interview Scene Example – spaza

Scene Example: Encountering the Community Scene Example