When entering a new group project,
there is always a hint of anxiety that comes along with it. Questions arise about collaboration,
differences in personality, ideas about the project, and the effort put forth
by all participating members. Our own personal definitions about success come
into play. My definition is going to be
different than the others because we all define success on our own terms. I could see success as an “A” while another
could be completion as being successful.
However, with Group 2 of which includes Kevin and Carmen; it couldn’t be
going any better-hopefully that won’t jinx it!! The only initial downfall suffered
was the loss of one of the original members of our Group; Lauren to another
group. This should prove to be a little
harder on the remaining three because the workload will now be increased.
So far the work is progressing with
ease. We have taken our subject of
criminal justice and narrowed it down to defining success from the accused
criminal’s standpoint when integrating into society after their sentence;
success in life after rehabilitation.
Now that we have focused on a specific aspect of this rather large
discourse community, we have uploaded over 20 articles, all of them having
something- big or small-to offer to the success definition.
Many questions have come up with
the progression of this project. One
being, how to form or arrange the annotated bibliography so that it makes sense
and flows cohesively. Another question
that I am having is how do we know if the articles that we put into the final
bibliography are worthy and the best to be there? Is the professor going to
understand what we were trying to say?
When working in a group and trying
to define success, each individual is going to have their own opinion or thoughts
on the accused criminal’s standpoint on success. We all come with attitudinal biases that
weigh in on how we are to define or think about this subject. Whether it be because of previous history or
expectation, even different beliefs; those attitudinal biases are going to have
an effect. We as a group have decided
not to try and define success based on what we initially “think”, but rather
keep an open mind about developing the definition that is going to change
through the course of this project. We
cannot control what others think or feel and when it comes to a criminal
perspective on success, we need to take into account who our audience is going
to be. Our groups’ definition is not the
“right” or only one, it is simply just a glimpse of what we have found through our
research.
