Topic 2

Reflection on working with a team:

When deciding our group topic, we talked about our interests out of all the global issues and what we would like to raise more awareness about in our presentation. After our discussion and discovering our common interests in environmental issues, we made a decision to focus on food wastage, with the research question, “How does food waste contribute to the environment and how can it be solved?”.

In our group, I contributed basic research of sources with statistics and produced presentation slides. I have provided the necessary information well, from reliable websites. Nevertheless, I have been weak at team discussions, where I wasn’t able to push my opinion to my teammates as effectively as others. Knowing my weakness when working as a team, I could work on presenting my personal opinions in front of others in a convincing manner.

I think our group had worked well together and effectively carried out the research. As our team had a similar range of interests and a strong aspiration to save the environment, it was easy to agree on one topic to research on. Our team members had active listening skills, making each other comfortable to share ideas, they had positive attitudes towards this project and were more committed to providing solutions to our problem.

However, what I think our team could have improved on would be time management. Towards the end of the group work we noticed that we were not organising our time intelligently. Although we have created a timeline to effectively proceed with our work, the goals were set too high in a short period of time and overestimating had led us to be chased by time. Focusing more on the fundamental information about the chosen global issue, the majority of time was spent on looking at the unnecessary details about food wastage. Thus we spent comparatively less time on the later part of the research where we had to provide a solution for our problem. In order to improve this, we could create a schedule that is considering all the possible delays and unexpected barriers, being realistics about the time we have compared to our actual skills.

Working in a team enhanced my teamwork skills, where cooperating with others in different situations became less challenging through our consistent meetings and discussions. Moreover, as team discussions share diverse ideas, it widened the range of perspectives of how I view various points, being able to consider different viewpoints of an issue.

Reflection on my personal learning:

As I was preparing for my personal research, I became more conscious about the massive amount of food wastage around the world and gained additional knowledge about what efforts people have been putting in to reduce this trouble. Food donation systems like food banks are something that I was not quite familiar with, however this personal learning journey became the opportunity for me to read up on these organisations.

I started on this research topic knowing that not a small number of people suffer from starvation whereas in some parts of the world, food is being wasted carelessly. In addition, the massive impact that food wastage has on the environment caught my attention. By studying this topic in detail and spending time to consider the most suitable solution, I wanted to make myself more mindful about this situation.

The solution I wanted to provide for food waste was to process fruits or vegetables that come in a bad shape and are not sold into other food products such as juice, jam or baked goods as there was a high percentage of food wastes that come from grocery stores. However, after further research on the statistics of types of food that are wasted, the amount of food wasted from grocery stores, excluding just fruits and vegetables, had to be considered as well. I came to a conclusion that having just one solution which only deals with ‘ugly food’ would not be enough to reduce food wastage drastically. As a consequence, I have decided to extend the solution in 3 stages, from the local perspective, which was to donate market food products with low demand to food banks, then have discounts on items that are badly shaped or nearly expire and finally process the remaining food that are not sold.

Preparing individual presentations was not an easy task as this was no longer a team work where I could seek assistance from my teammates. Nonetheless, throughout the process of working on this project and making developments myself, it led me to learn a new skill that would be essential in the future. I learned how to look for suitable sources of information and summarise it to make it sound appealing for the audience. I also learned a way to check for the reliability of information and to evaluate different sources. Having self reflection on my own presentation made me realise that I was speaking too softly with the same tone which made my speech boring. I tried making improvements on what could be done better and eventually got to learn more about myself, finding out my strengths and weaknesses throughout this project.