Reflection on teamwork
Working as a team to give life to this blog was an undoubtedly stimulating and challenging experience. We here reflect on the way we worked together to reach our goal of writing a blog about the development of fascism and the current reality of far-right parties in Europe. In particular, we will explain how we chose the members of this team, we will present how we organized the work, what we liked about working in a team, the difficulties we encountered and the way we overcame them.
Our team came into being in a very curious way. Owain decided to trust his feeling and simply ask the two people sitting next to him to work together. The last addition to the team was also very casual. Anna was in fact randomly chosen by the other three team members. The result of these spontaneous and almost accidental choices nevertheless resulted in a winning combination of people. We can now say to be happy with the outcome of those decisions, that gave us the possibility to work with people we did not know and with whom we had never worked before.
Organizing the workload came very naturally, as we luckily were all ready to give our contribution to the team. We divided the workload equally, taking into account our preferences and interests. Through the use of shared documents, we were able to constantly add our inputs to the parts of the blog that were to be written together. We also decided to meet each week in order to update each other on the progress of our tasks and to simply discuss ways to improve our work.
The whole process of writing this blog was mostly a positive and rewarding experience, we obviously encountered more than one difficulty. In general, the biggest challenge was to work in a team for the first time ever. In particular, it was very hard for us to find a common thread connecting our previous works in a single coherent blog. We finally succeeded after thoroughly reading each other’s literature reviews and deciding together on how to steer our own posts in order to link to the others’. Also, of course, it was not always easy to agree on certain decisions, but we always managed to communicate openly to solve the disagreements.
Regardless of the difficulties, we liked working together very much on this blog. In particular, we really enjoyed the possibility of having constant feedback and being able to discuss possible ways to improve both our individual and group works. Also, we understand the value of this whole project and the resource it can prove to be in the future, as the skill to work in a team will be necessary for most jobs.
