POLAR Group Intervention

The final iteration of my Model was completed and I needed to test it. With the second Lockdown my plans to test it on the Allotments, Traders and Church Hall workshops had to be put on hold. I had been working on a co-curricular project with my POLAR interdisciplinary team of six students from six different countries on food waste saving, for a university campus canteen in switzerland. The whole project had 5 teams. After working in my team for several weeks now it was becoming a bit of an issue that only three of us would engage and contribute to team discussions. It appeared that other teams were engaging and being proactive with each other and getting a better volume of results. A team colleague raised her concerns and it was discussed with our coach. I saw this as an opportunity to test my Model so, I offered to hold my zine workshop session. After all, my whole purpose was “to use food as a conduit to help break down barriers and promote cultural sharing”.

My hypothesis for this intervention was that it would result in better communication within the team. There would be hurdles if some team members did not want to engage more or could not see the benefit of it for the team, or perhaps were just shy. This particular workshop was even more challenging as they were not all resident in UK. I was also aware that the possible reason for lack of engagement was that levels of sharing are different in some cultures and students are not expected to participate with tutors.

I reworked my proforma, Powerpoint presentation and feedback form to be targetted to this groups specific requirements. Learning from my latest workshops I cut the number of questions down to keep the session in a practical time slot of two hours. I adjusted the questions to get the specific information I wanted to focus on. I found that I only needed six questions which actually followed the framewok for my Model.

Results

Analysis and Reflection

The session took some time to warm up. I think this was due to the fact that the group were not aware of my research and its background. That made it more interesting and challenging. This was conducted entirely through social media and zoom which I am confident in managing now. I did send out interactive pdf forms as pre session questionnaires and feedback forms. Only 10% filled them in so this proved unsuccessful. Learning from this I might try to use a more immediate results platform next.

Since the intervention I have noticed more engagement from the quieter members of the team. They are responding to messages more and in discussions have given positive feedback. I unfortunately have not been able to record the conversations.

I was pleased that I cut the number of questions down, which meant that everybody had a chance to discuss their responses to the questions in a non pressured way. It worked in that it provided a forum for the quieter members to engage on a topic they were knowledgable about. It occurred to me that the issues of non engagement was due to insecurities speaking in the larger groups because the subject matter and people were unfamiliar.

Reflecting on this it gave me affirmation to my enquiry: “Can food, culture and storytelling break down barriers and promote cultural sharing. It seemed the cultural conversations brought the participants out of their shell and, gave a little door to pass through and feel they were more comfortable in the room of the wider forum.