07/18/18

1. We were physically active in the beginning of session: followed WINCART's 10 minute exercise session with Asian Pacific Islanders; I followed the routine to a tee and Dana complimented me on that.
2. As we cooled down, Emily talked about Sora's academic background and what she has accomplished as a scholar.
3. Sora's presentation was about research and what defines research. She has been criticized for doing "soft research" instead of "hard research" because she did not follow the strict biomedical research methods when she conducted her research.
4. Her presentation talked about Community-Based Participatory Research and how it helps both the community and the researcher(s). Sora gave us advice that since we are now enrolled in a master's program that we should team up with our cohort mates in order to do well in classes. During our undergrad, it was whoever got the highest score that set the curve so we rarely worked well in groups. In master's programs, it was whether or not we were competent enough to pass the class, not just good grades, but a clear understanding of the concepts we were learning about in class.
5. I made a point in class that the methods for CBRR was rather similar to the methods in anthropology when it came to observing and immersing yourself into a new community/population. Sora was glad that I brought that up because CBPR derived some of their methods from the anthropology field. I am grateful that I am able to make connections from previous classes to current classes.
6. We dissected Sora's academic journal article and although it was nostalgic reading an academic journal article, it was information overload and I nodded off several times when reading the article. She taught us how to skim and read in-depth for academic journal articles and that was beneficial for me because I did not skim effectively when it came to selecting journal articles for my paper. Then, we broke up into groups to come up with three to five bullet points about our section. Luckily, I got the Conclusion/Implications group which was the shortest section, but I did not get a chance to read the conclusion. However, we were able to summarize the conclusion and pointed out one of the biggest implications stated in the conclusion.
7. During the last session, Erin had us read a passage about learning not just the outer atmosphere but also the inner atmosphere. For so long, we have encountered educators who are burned out, who no longer cared about education for the better good. Everything has been standardized according to the law and we lost touch of learning in order to give back the community, not to excel for our own benefit.
8. We wrote about our dreams and what we want to achieve and what types of research questions emerged from our ideas. We, then, presented our research questions to the session and put our post it notes on the board so that groups can be created for journal clubs and literature reviews. In these groups, we hope to find similar articles that we could send each other so we may use them for literature reviews and presentations at the end of the summer program.