05 Sep Student Seminar Day 3 – 5
Day 3
Today we settled a little bit and we had the first opportunity to work together on our main assignment for the week. We came up with the idea of using equestrian sports for integration and exclusion. Horses can’t see race or skin colour, they simply don’t judge by who you are but by how you act. From this perspective our idea was to use this safe space that the horse creates to bring people together. We took our time to find some interesting literature and to discuss the idea that we had.
In the afternoon we had field trips and took our time to explore the city of Malmo, in this case different urban sport arenas. I went to a skatepark called Stapelbäddsparken, together with people from the other groups in the management game. After we all came back from our urban sport arenas we discussed in our own group what we have seen at different places. We closed the day again with a nice dinner.
Day 4
Day 4 started as usual, quite early. Breakfast was at 7.30 and I could feel that the group was getting more tired. That probably had to do with the intensive program, but maybe with the beers from last night as well… After breakfast we had a lecture by Dr. S. Hedenborg, who taught us some interesting insights about inclusion and exclusion in sports. She was critical about the Swedish sport system, as it was hard to tell if there were any hard facts that underlie the results of such programs. After the lecture we had lots of time to work on our assignment. Because the next day, Wednesday, we had our final presentations and everything should be ready and prepared today.
Day 5
Wednesday was the final of the management game. I discussed with my team who the presenter was going to be. Meanwhile, we did some additional groupwork and we had an interesting lecture about how to stimulate innovation, and then we had once again a great lunch at the Malmo university Orkanen. After this, it was time for the presentations! We were all filmed and as we listened through the other group’s ideas we found out the level of innovation was quite high. I would say that a lot of teams came with interesting ideas how to use sports in a new way for inclusion.
Unfortunately, our group didn’t win the presentations, but still it felt that we achieved a lot together, not only as a team but all of us students together.
I thank Mattias and his team for the great opportunity we were offered. They did an outstanding job in facilitating everything from breakfast to social programs to make us feel comfortable and to get the best out of ourselves.
In the evening we were all happy that we finished the management game and we had the grand opening ceremony of the EASM conference.
by Mart