Documentation and reflection

Today we had a lecture about how we should document, and reflect over, the things we do/see on our trip. There was a lot of interesting stuff that, if I'm honest, I've never really contemplated (even if I have done most of it automatically). I'm going to write a summary of part of the lecture (in case any of you want to read about it).  

Summary: 

Documentation and reflection

It's important to "keep a lookout", which means we should try to see things in our surroundings (such as what is important to the people we're trying to understand). 

Some examples of things we can document are:

- our first encounter with something/someone (it's can be interesting to immortalize those impressions before they're forgotten).

- something we want to study more/ find out more about.

It's important when you are documenting something to allow your curiousity to be your basis for the pictures you take or the knowledge you gain. It's also important to keep your target group in mind. To vary the documentation you can use sounds you've recorded, drawings, etc. 

What is documentation?

Documentation can be a scrapbook, photoalbum, a description of "this is how we do things here", etc. It can also be an active tool in capturing different educational processes. When we use our cameras, we should use them as tools to help us answer questions (we have a question and it finds the answer). It can be smart to formulate questions from what we see. Example: How are cultural values expressed? or How does/do the concept of time/peoples interests come accross?

"One shouldn't document what one knows, but what one wants to find out."

That was just a small part of what we heard/talked about in the lecture. We also talked about how to take pictures with a purpose (not just pointing the camera at everything and nothing shooting pictures, like most of us do on vacation). That was the part I found most interesting, because I really want to get better at taking good pictures. Have you ever been on vacation, brought your camera intending to capture every moment, and then it ends up sitting in your hotel room? That's usually how it is for me because I hate feeling like a tourist. The lecturer encouraged us to always have our camera with us while we're on our trip, so we can get pictures of the things we've been wanting an answer to. So that is definitly something I need to work on. To wrap things up we were given a little task. We were divided into groups of two. Our task was to document how multiculturalism is expressed in public. We were only allowed to use four pictures and had to explain why we chose the ones we did. We didn't really have that much time either, so all the pics are taken around campus at the university. Here are three of the pics me and my partner chose to use: 

We chose to photograph this one because it reminded us of Sami art, which shows that we're taught about the Sami culture at the university (which to us seemed like an indication multiculturality is found in public).

 We took a picture of olives because we have to import them from countries like Greece, Italy and Spain. They are not what we would classify as typically Norwegian. After telling our lecturer that, we were asked "What is typically Norwegian". To which we answered it's what we're used to, which technically makes olives Norwegian since most of us have them in our fridges. I guess, though, at some point there were few Norwegians who knew what an olive was. Therefore I'd still like to think that they are a part of Norwegian multiculturality which has become well integrated.

This one doesn't really need an explanation does it? It just underlines the fact that we have quite a few students at the university from other countries/cultures.