Audience(if there is an audience or whoever is reading this), be prepared, because this blog is going to get a LOT more chaotic from now on.

I chose to map everything out during spring break because I was getting tangled in my own thoughts.

This is basically a physical version of my internal thoughts. I’ve linked everything that I thought was objectively(and subjectively) logical.

I got a bit stuck when we were asked to draw a mind map turning time into space——I interpreted it as mapping out what we imagine our action would be from May to November.

When I realised that I was basically copying what I had already done before, I turned the page over.

A project evolving is a bit like the evolving of a plot in a story. Hence, quoting Neil Gaiman: “And then what happens?”(in his words, this sentence always pushes a story forward)

Using fiction as an intervention is an easy thing to say(and to write in essays and anything made up with words) but it’s a harder thing to plan, and even harder to actually take action. Letting go of reality and rules and the norm is harder than I thought as well, because our minds are used to a certain way of thinking, and we forget that what already exists in reality was once imagination, a thought or an idea in a person’s head, and if that thought had been different, or was changed during its evolvement, the world we live in might have been veeeeeery different from what we are used to now.

I don’t know a lot about what happens next. But I do know that if I asked someone about the education system, they would show their immediate views about it(I’ve been mostly focusing on the negative side of people’s comments because there were a LOT of negative comments, and they never really appear in an interview sort of conversation, they mostly appeared in a conversation-in-the-bar-and-everyone-was-tipsy sort of conversation), and then, reading and understanding psychological and societal phenomenons, I would catagorize those comments.

And, at least to me, reading fiction(dystopian and speculative fiction) like 1984 and Brave New World REALLY helps to link psychological and societal methodologies to facts I witness and comments I hear in real life.

I think interviews are the last thing I could do to get evidence because people don’t usually feel safe enough to tell the truth in that environment, because they know an interview will be recorded and documented and sent to other people and an unknown audience. The comments I saw on social media(in China) addressing this topic sound much more REAL. Up till now, starting an intervention on social media addressing this topic is probably going to get more genuine reaction compared with an interview.

This is an example of an alternate reality game. The creator uploaded 8 videos on Bilibili, introducing 8 stages of the game, and created an uploading area for players to upload their answers. I loved this game because people were really actively engaging in solving the mystery in the narrative. And it helps because the central plot of this game is about Final Exams. (a bit like Squid Game actually)

Just remembered, I lost definitions of words I was originally really certain of (Fiction, Storytelling, Narrative etc), but then I decided to stick to my own understanding of those terms because I had to have an initial definition of those words in order to communicate.

We also did a “Theory of Change” worksheet on our individual projects.

Ummm…based on what I have up till now, I’ll probably need to redo it.

My research question had morphed and evolved. This is the newest version:

How can dystopian fiction reduce the negative psychological impact of result-based education on current and former students?

I replaced “we” with “dystopian fiction”. It was originally “How can we reduce the impact of……”

TBC.