In this session our group aimed to complete our interview process. In doing so, each group member had the chance to interact with people of different ages who have grown up in Regent Park or are currently growing up in Regent Park.We found interviewees with the help of our resident group members. Through interviews, we feel we had the chance to learn more about individual experiences growing up in the neighborhood. It was interesting to see how the experiences of youths compared to the experiences of adults in our Changing Cultures of Regent Park class. Our interviews began with some broad dialogue about the experience of youth, including two children of one of our partners, Rabia, as well as a Toronto Metropolitan University student who’s grown up in Regent Park. We ended our last interview with a more focused and in depth discussion with Ishmael, a current adult resident in Regent Park who grew up in the neighborhood, which is how we aim to conduct our final podcast discussion. We want to begin broadly about the general experience of youth and slowly lead into our specific argument which is ultimately, youth in Regent Park should have affordable housing options should they choose to stay in the neighborhood as adults.
When starting the interview process, we were challenged by many group members being nervous to conduct an interview and the group feeling unprepared for the process. However, now that interviews are complete, we are able to format a script for our final podcast which we hope to film this upcoming week. Throughout this week Daniel and Kaylee will be conducting research for the formal write-up as well as to incorporate into the script of the podcast. Although this upcoming week will likely be stressful, our previous session was successful in our completion of the interviews.
We wanted to thank the Focus staff and Professor Aditi Mehta for their help with this week’s portion of the project. The Focus staff helped us with the filming of the interviews and has offered to help us navigate editing software in the upcoming weeks. Professor Mehta was helpful in giving feedback on our interviews and facilitating group interaction throughout the interview process.
We are hoping this project can attract the attention of other Regent Park residents who share the same experiences as interviewees. We also hope to capture the attention of the Toronto City Housing Commision in regards to common complaints about the infrastructure and its ongoing changes throughout Regent Park. However, we want these audiences to have the ability to interact with our project. We will be including questions at the beginning of the podcast and pausing to give the audience time to answer them. We will then circle back to the questions at the end of the podcast to see if the audience has changed their answers.
Thus far, this process has been extremely eye-opening. This week specifically has been very rewarding as we are now beginning to see our project come to life. We are stressed about the work ahead but overall excited to continue the process.
Fatiha and Miguel having a chat with Ahmed
Regent Park Radio Shack: Daniel, Fatiha, Kaylee, Miguel, Murshida, Rabia