This past Monday, Faithful Delta made some significant progress on our group project, but also realized some of the challenges that we are facing.
We were joined by Tommy, a friend of Jim’s who is interested in getting out of the U of T “bubble” and exploring the rest of Toronto (he was actually very helpful in critically reflecting on our ideas, so thanks Tommy!). Since we came up with a rough idea of our project and who to interview last week, we decided to head to Regent Park early Monday afternoon to visit some of the community organizations and institutions and potentially set up interviews.
Our first stop was SEAS, which we talked about in our last two blog posts. Since our group wanted to explore the interactions between the (non-Muslim) East Asian community and the Muslim community in Regent Park, we thought that SEAS would be a good starting point. After introducing ourselves and our project to Sabrina, Program Director at SEAS, we encountered our first challenge: the bureaucracy involved in setting up an interview. The supervisor was sympathetic to us and willing to help but stated that setting up an interview with a SEAS client would need to go through her boss and we may have to wait until the end of March to hear back. That would cause a problem for us, since we should have finished our project by then. We plan on sending a formal email, as requested, to Sabrina, but we will provide more flexibility, such as including the option to interview a SEAS staff member who lives in Regent Park.
Next, we visited the nearby Regent Park Community Centre. Since the community centre acts as a hub for Regent Park residents, we thought that the staff there may be able to share their knowledge of the community and point us in the right direction. Through interacting with an administrative staff at the community centre, we realized another problem: we weren’t entirely sure who we wanted to interview (any East Asian and Muslim residents? Or those with specific traits or experiences?). We also weren’t sure we were seeking to gain out of the interviews, partly because we haven’t thought of specific interview questions. These problems made us a little directionless.
Just three Asian-guys-with-glasses in front of the Regent Park Community Centre. Photo by Tommy.
However, the community centre staff member did suggest us to visit the local mosque and the TAIE private school. We had time to visit one more location, so we decided to visit the TAIE school before heading to class. Upon reaching TAIE, we had trouble finding the entrance to the school. We asked a student for directions, who informed us that the classroom and administrative building is actually on Church St, whereas this building in Regent Park houses the school dorm and cafeteria. We were thus faced with this question: should we go through the school administration to set up interviews, or should we do so informally by enlisting volunteers ourselves?
Manson Tower, housing the dorms and cafeteria of TAIE International Institute. Photo from Emporis.
Back at Regent Park Focus, Jim, Tommy and I sat down to reflect on our visits and discuss the questions and challenges that we have encountered thus far. To help us find direction, we eventually came up with 3 questions that we hope to explore through this project:
How do (non-Muslim) East Asian residents and Muslim residents experience the multiculturalism of Regent Park in their daily lives?
Do these two ethnic/religious groups interact with each other? How do they interact, or why do they not interact?
What would promote understanding/interaction between these two groups?
After coming up with these guiding questions, we also wrote down a draft list of interview questions. These two steps provided us with a much clearer sense of direction going forward, including who to interview and what we hope to gain from the interviews.
It was then time to consider our next steps and the logistics of conducting interviews. We decided that, next week, we would visit TAIE and proactively seek out students to participate in our project as interviewees, saving us from spending the time and effort of going through the school’s administration. For SEAS, we will send out an email proposal soon, but if we are able to gain connection otherwise with the people at SEAS, it would be much more helpful. We also need to prepare for the risk of SEAS not being able to respond to us before our deadline (especially through the email approach), so we need to come up with a Plan B on hearing from other East Asian residents in Regent Park. Additionally, we hope that our Diva Girl partners will show up next week, or else we may need to interview Diva Girls of other groups. We may also need a plan to talk to other Muslim community members.
There is still a lot of work to be done, but we’re confident that we will be able to face the challenges ahead of us!
The Faithful Delta team members are Aisha, Amal, Andrew, Jim, Sahara (+Tommy as an honorary group member this week).