13.01.20

Hike to Holmenkollen

The first hike to Holmenkollen was together with the norwegian Outdoor Education course. Our group is balanced in gender. I think we even have more women than men in our group, what is different to their group, because they´re more men than women.
Our international group now knows each other a bit now, but we had not much contact to the Norwegians. That’s why we at the beginning of the hike were just in our groups and didn´t mix the groups. It was also very difficult to come in contact to the norwegian students, because they were talking just Norwegian when they were in their groups. I think we were in the part of forming considering to Tuckmans theory about group dynamics, because we were shy and had also differences between the Internationals and the Norwegians e.g. based on the language.
That´s why Haron had the great idea to introduce the rules, we made firstly just for our group, also into the big, heterogeneous group. They told us that they have nearly the same rules, except the language-rule. But they agreed with our rules and understood also our problem with the language. This probably was the change from forming into storming, because we had Haron as a extroverted person that took the leadership in our group and communicated in the name of our group with the others. But we can see on this example very good, that the sequenced of parts are not strict, because we were also in the part of Norming, when we made rules together and excepted them. Very good for our cohesion and especially for getting to know each other we played group dynamic games. We played a game where Jaymee said something and everybody who agreed with it had to introduce himself or herself and tell something about Jaymees topic. He said topics like football, pets and more. After that Nathalie had the idea to play a game where we stood in a circle and everybody was asked to say his or her name and make a move. Everybody had to repeat the move. So we learned our names and also some moved told us something about the person.
After that we hiked back to the university and our cohesion was much better than before. We were all speaking english, so everybody could join the conversations and we knew hobbies about the others and had topics we could talk about. I would also categorize this into the part of Norming.