“A bend in the road is not the end of the road, unless you fail to make the turn”- Helen Keller

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a nice winter break. After meeting a few bends in the road at the end of last semester, I used the opportunity to put my laptop away, and instead connect with both the familiar and the different, and the near and the distant across people, geographies and experiences around me. This process of pausing, resting and reconnecting I feel helps open my mind up to different possibilities while keeping me grounded in the present.

The KIPP reflective essay last semester was a great way for me to consolidate my thoughts and crystallise a direction for my project. I think I’m now set on a project identity, some broad research questions (currently I have a few too many so one of my next steps will be to refine), and a general idea of which research and delivery methods I may use (these too need further refinement). No doubt, my future blogs will share my journey of breaking these down, exploring new avenues and uncovering some clear water (I hope).

So, what’s my project all about? Here’s an excerpt from my KIPP reflective essay:

“My core project idea aims to create a conceptual framework that explains how individuals imagine that positive change occurs. Feedback provided through my week 3 blog, suggested that I link my final project to the development of my start-up which aims to enable people to utilise their privileges- i.e., the resources they already have whether that be time, skills, money or something else- to solve for global challenges. The start-up will empower a community of global change makers at all levels of society with its key foundations building upon concepts of agency (which from this point I will refer to as self-efficacy) and community. My final project links to this by exploring the mechanisms through which self-efficacy occurs at an individual level, from perspectives of society’s less privileged and more-privileged. Additionally, I hope to uncover whether or not self-efficacy effects on positive change at an individual level can be extrapolated to predict the way positive change occurs at a societal level.”

One of the first things I intend to do next is to explore the subtle differences between self-efficacy, agency and capacity/capability. In conversation with Juli last semester, I learnt that disciplines differ in the way that they refer to an individual’s autonomy to make their own decisions and feel empowered to take responsibility for their actions. With this concept underlying my futures project, one of my next steps will be to decipher these subtle differences, the implicit assumptions of each and how this translates to different contexts. Hopefully then, I can ensure that the angle from which I approach the concept of ‘agency’ fits the scope of my project.

A final note/food for thought

Did curiosity really kill the cat?

Week 1 Reflections: It’s all about the angles / Knowledge Integration and Project Planning: Data, Inequality and Society (2022-2023) by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0