The first week was particularly challenging. As I am quickly learning is the case with research projects such as these, the brief of investigating ‘community engagement’ was extremely daunting. This felt like such a huge and nebulous term, and we had only a few key ideas at first of what research in this area would mean. I felt rather adrift as a result – the entire process of researching is unknown to me, being different in nature to my studies within my degree. Further to this, working in a group was an unexpectedly novel experience. I felt going into this project that I was a strong group worker, able to lead effectively when necessarily but also able to delegate/collaborate with others. I quickly realised during the first week, however, that whilst this is still the case some of these skills required refurbishment. I haven’t had to work in a group setting for around two years, and this was a startling realisation to me. Overall, I was intimidated by the task in front of me, and truthfully in doubt about my capacities to rise to it in that moment.

This week however was considerably more successful, in my view, and more reassuring. We delivered our first extra-curricular session in the classroom, which was a really fun experience. I have always enjoyed working with young people and collaborating with them creatively, and this week was no exception. The age group which we delivered the session to did come with some challenges, as children around the pre-teens age in my experience are often strong-willed as they develop their nascent teenage identities. This being the case, the children were fairly engaged with the story-based activities after what I saw as a rocky start to the session. Our plan for the session provided a useful skeleton for actually running the session, but we adapted and strayed from it heavily – ultimately it’s only in the session itself that you see what’s working and what’s not, and you respond accordingly.

The research brief feels less nebulous now that we have reviewed some literature, which is reassuring. There are pre-existing frameworks regarding community engagement which I’m looking forward to investigating, and these will provide a useful foundation from which we can conduct successful primary research. Additionally, I am learning to trust my peers more which is alleviating my stress to a further degree. My peers worked together to write a really good revised edition of the research proposal which I heavily wrote, and they have also come up with really great ideas for our session plans. I’m glad that I’m rediscovering the group-working skills that I had developed for so long when I was younger.

This upcoming week should be very fun. We need to come up with our survey/interview questions and get these out to the stakeholders that we wish to engage with. This is very daunting, because again I don’t really know anything about designing qualitative data collection and I don’t have a yardstick of quality to measure myself against. We will also further deliver sessions, starting our delivery to the younger group of students. I’m coming across some stress in trying to coordinate data collection and engagement with stakeholders with other groups, and it will be interesting to see how smooth this is this week.