Blog #8

At some point in everyone's life I believe we all will experience some of Peck's theories and stages. I experience most of the stages every year working summer youth camps for the City of Gaithersburg. In brief, every summer for the past 5 years I work with an organization that provides a summer camp experience for kids around the Gaithersburg area. Community is something we value with the City of Gaithersburg so we try our best to develop a strong, inclusive and engaging one so that we all can grow. We offer things like amusement park trips, pool days, reading & math programs, overnight excursions, museum trips etc. We are separated into several sites with different types of camps. For an example we have Camp Endeavor which is a middle school camp, or we have Camp Discovery which is a elementary camp. In order for us to provide these trips and experiences, we have to plan the upcoming months with our designated camp site. Each year we are assigned to a camp site that we haven't worked previously. This is where I experience Peck's theory and stages.

In the first stage, Pseudo-community everyone bounces ideas off of each other. Since no one really knows one another everyone pretty much is avoiding conflict and any disagreement. This stage is very undeveloped because we could use this time to share our experiences that could help the group now and ultimately speed the planning process up. The second stage is chaos. In this stage people are beginning to settle in. Friends start to form. People find their role.We are now more comfortable speaking up and asserting our perspectives and ideas, but with that comes disagreement. People share ideas from past summers that they think should be added to our site or avoided. Some people bring in ideas that they feel worked at their camp but some of those ideas won't work at the new camp site and people sometimes take that personal, causing riff within the community. In the third stage, people are getting restless and pretty much annoyed with spending hours each day planning. The group realizes we need to come together and that the ideas people are sharing can actually have an impact on what needs to be accomplished, whether they are used or not. At this point people are tired of the immaturity and want to get things done. In the fourth stage, every member has an understanding of how the group works and people execute their role to the best of their ability. Everyone feels as if they belong and their input matters. We can bounce ideas off one another more effectively. We realize that disagreement in the long run helps us reach our goal because it allows everyone to think critically.

An overall consensus played a role in developing our authentic community. We all were able to voice our opinions. I think as a group we were able to realize the significance of this program and realized we were apart of something much greater than ourselves which ultimately got us to our consensus.