Terminology, Talking, and a Trek Through Trees

Another day down in Corvallis! Today was a day spent mainly in the classroom learning terminology in regards to resilience as well as how to create interview questions and conduct interviews.

We learned about models (not the kind that show off the latest fashion, but the ones that are a useful representation of a system). The Sustainability Model has been commonly used.

(http://www.downstate.edu/green/sustainability.html)

This model has been helpful, but it has its drawbacks. It is a very linear system, in that it draws a lot on the past to make predictions for the future. It is also static in nature, meaning that it is trying to achieve a steady state. The issue with this is that it does not account for disturbance. Although the system tries to achieve stability, a stable system is usually the exception, not the rule. In most systems change is occurring much more often than stability.

To account for this, a complex adaptive system can be considered instead that shows the more cyclic nature of a system.

(http://galleryhip.com/complex-adaptive-system.html)

This type of system allows for the resilience of a system to be accounted for as well as the path that a system should take in times of disturbance to adapt and still maintain its basic structure and function.

Following our discussions on models, we had the opportunity to hear from Sarah Cunningham. She has been working on an anthropological study within a small rural community in South Central Oregon. We got the chance to hear about her experiences entering into this community and trying to gain an understanding of their lifestyles and practices. She was able to provide us with some strategies for interviewing and making observations.

Nancy Rosenberger then followed up on this topic by explaining participant observation. This is a technique that we can use to try to make note of our surroundings and observe things that we may not have placed importance on. She also taught us how to create questions to ask during interviews and discussed how to conduct an interview.

At this point, we broke up into teams of four and practiced what we had learned. We created 3-4 questions that we thought would be good to ask in order to understand each others’ high school experiences, then conducted interviews to practice asking questions and taking notes.

Following this activity, we came back together and learned about the two main teams that we will be working in for the rest of the class. The first team, will be focusing their investigations on mainly food and agriculture, while the second team will be more focused on forestry and natural resources.

At this point, we were dismissed from class for the day, but we decided to go to the McDonald Dunn Forest, owned by Oregon State University’s College of Forestry to go for a hike and show the Japanese students and Oregon students from Oregon Institute of Technology and Eastern Oregon University around. We drove out to Peavy Arboretum and hiked up to Cronemiller Lake along an intensive management trail. At the lake, we stopped to enjoy the logging sports arena and take a few pictures.