On January the 23rd ourt secon joint field trip with the norwegian fruluftsliv course took place. The norwegian welcomed us infront of the Spicheren building located at the campus and divided us in eigth diffrent groups consitsing of four to sic people.
I was assigned to group five along with Bowen from our international group and Stine, Anna and Erik from the Norwegian class. Together the whole group waled up to Jegersberg where we received our first time challenge. The task was to carry the tallest person of our team to the next checkpoint on a self build device. We quickly decided to to find to long logs of wood and attach them to our tarp. Each of us took one end of a log and together we lifted up Erik and carried him about 500 meteres to the next checkpoint.
After that five further challenges awaited us.
- Build a bonfire and boil an egg
- Collect one natural item from the forrest for each letter of the alphabet
- Building towers out of stone and carrying between two places
- Learning the Norwegian children’s song “Jeg gikk en tur på stien” and perform it infront of the group
- Memorize 40 diffrent objects on a Tarp in two minutes
During the tasks our team performed really well. Already in the first task the group started motivating each other. However everybody seemed to be slightly reserved and careful with the others. Since we only had little time to get to know each other before the challenge started our whole strategy on the first challenge was improvise and figure out solutions on the go.
Bruce Tuckman’s model of group development (1965) states that a group experiences four diffrent stages, forming; storming; norming and performing. Within our group it was hard to distinguish between the diffrent stages. Because we only had little time before our first challenge I would say that we just briefly went throught the phases of forming, storming and norming and started quickly with performing. The forming of the group was already done by the norwegian outdoor class because they assigned us into our groups. Also we had a common goal of winning the competition. The phases of storming and norming are much harder to distinguish. Some parts of the norming had been clear. They consisted of the certain rules that applied to the challenge and also unspoken rules within the norwegian and european culture.
After the first challenge our team felt like it had grown closer together. We learned that we can but our trust in the other teammembers and that they are willing to contribute to the group. However for the time in between the challenges our group did not stay together but rather spent the time with people from the own course. I believe this is to the fact that we feel more comfortable with the people we already know and feel less vulnerable in their surrounding. Another sign for that was that the Norwegian students talked in norwegian a lot of times, which was unfortunate for our group cohesion because it excluded Bowen and me from some decisions and information. Which led us back to the stage of storming. We had to make sure we communicate as a team. We jumped several times between the diffrent stages and at the end i felt like we had grown together as a team.
Tuckman, B. (1965) Developmental sequence in small groups. under http://web.mit.edu/curhan/www/docs/Articles/15341_Readings/Group_Dynamics/Tuckman_1965_Developmental_sequence_in_small_groups.pdf (accessed on 29.01.2017)