11.14 - Belonging

Today we started work on our research projects associated with the projects that project teams are working on. The idea of these research projects will be to identify and explain why there is a need for the project and how the activities of the project benefit society. In their project teams everyone drafted questions in response to the following:

What questions would someone need answered in order to understand why your project team’s work is good?

To model possible questions in response to this prompt, I reviewed a list of brainstormed project questions for one of the projects we did not end up committing to (creating an animal shelter for Lisbon).

Animal Shelter
What services do animal shelters provide.

Why are homeless pets a problem?

How much of a problem is domestic animal homelessness a problem in this area?

To what degree do animal shelters help problems associated with homeless pets.

What are the benefits to having pets (when people get them from shelters)?

After creating their brainstormed lists, teams shared out their questions and we discussed these as a class to refine and improve the questions.

For the next part of our research, we are going to have a short unit on how to read and digest information from academic articles. In class we talked about how these articles are a lot like eating a coconut, hard to crack into, but then excellent and really sweet and refreshing inside. The article we are going to take a look at talks about the idea of a need to belong. To prepare for this topic we looked at the quote "People who need people are just people who need people." This quote is from an LCD Soundsystem song and provided us with a way to talk about whether there really are people who don't need people (prompt and song below).

 

Everyone had about 7 and a half minutes to respond to this prompt as we listened to the song "One Touch." Everyone then shared out their responses to this prompt with a partner and then we discussed responses as a class. The main points of our discussion were as follows:

1 - Everyone likely needs some contact with other people, but some people might require more or less than other people to have enough contact.
2 - It is probably possible to survive in the sense of being alive without contact from other people as long as someone has appropriate food and shelter.
3 - Someone without any contact with people might begin to change psychologically and become mentally unhealthy.
4 - People like Christopher Knight, might be the exception to this rule. He had food, shelter, and no real contact with people for 27 years and seemed to be doing fine.

We will continue developing our understanding of this topic in the next few classes.


Homework:

Work associated with your project as appropriate.

Update your project team's task schedule and contact log as appropriate.