This is a CTP of initiative: DESIS - DESIS Lab Belo Horizonte (Brazil)
This CTP happens almost every year, at the end of the academic periods. Each year, a significant number of students complete their degrees, masters and doctorates and leave the university environment.
Some people, like the interviewee explains, do a selection test for the subsequent level of education (such as those that complete under-graduation apply for graduation) and with that, stay for a longer time in the laboratory. But, she said, most of them go out and "begin their professional life".
Of course, only a small proportion of students work in the DESIS BH if the total number of students at the university or on the design course are considered. But, according to the interviewee they have to change the team members over the years.
Although it always occurs, this change becomes a CTP every time it occurs and has both good and bad aspects according to the interviewee. The good aspect is that each year, new students seek out the laboratory and, when they arrive, they arrive with specific and different interests. Their concerns are not always related to what the DESIS BH is doing at that moment. But according to the coordinator of the laboratory, the demand comes from the students and therefore the projects change so that the student’s interests can be fulfilled.
The negative side, according to her, is that there are time limits for the development of each project which are established by the amount of time that the students will be resident at the university and these time limits are not always ideal. Contrary to the development of new projects when new students arrive, the projects developed by the students often come to an end when they leave.
The DESIS BH Laboratory (as well as most Brazilian university laboratories) have students (undergraduate, master and doctorate) as a significant part of their team, which is also composed of professors that are assigned to the Laboratory. In the case of the local initiative of the DESIS Network of Belo Horizonte, the fixed team is made of only two teachers: "As a university, we have to change the team every year, students come and go, many projects are actually because of them (...) they come with new demands related to their areas of expertise (...) these students come with different experiences and visions, come from different places and therefore bring a new point of view into the laboratory" stating that this change is very challenging.
This change sometimes forces them to change characteristics of the projects and also to sometimes end them prematurely: "Many students come from the state's rural areas and every city has specific characteristics. Sometimes, we can continue the project by working on the same project in a different region, but this is not always possible.
The teams are comprised of different students and not all come and go at the same moment, which requires many adaptations: "(...) Who stays perceives the change, the students that leave do not know, because they left...”
Academic Calendar - the academic calendar is a "natural cycle of the university". She explains that the undergraduate students, for example, can only be accepted in laboratories after the second academic period (in Brazil, the periods are 2 per year and correspond to a half year each) and the maximum length of time is 3 years (but the students cannot always stay for three years in the lab), "It is relatively frequent that a student cancels a module in order to be able to stay for one more period" explains the coordinator, regarding the fact that time is frequently too short for the purposes of the projects.
Teachers - teachers need time to adjust the completion of the projects with the input and output of the students. For them this is not a trivial task and requires the establishment of new interpersonal relations among all, adaptation of the projects to the competences of the new students, commitment to the inclusion of the new students and the expertise to handle all the changes
Students - these are the ones that are entering and leaving the teams. Often, the time spent on the project is also not enough from the perception of students, according to the interviewee.
March/ August of every year - the academic calendar changes cause the CTP. This may or may not occur, depending on the students who are working in the projects in the lab at that moment.
Change and/or project adjustments - because of these outputs they are sometimes forced to abandon projects which are of interest to a specific student when they cannot get another student interested, or when they fail to make adjustments, but to make adjustments the project needs to be at a really mature stage of development. At other times, so that the project can continue to move forward, it needs to be adapted to another region of the state, because that may be of interest to a student from that region.
There is not exactly a contestation, since the fixed team is only composed of two teachers who live this dynamic on a daily basis.But the interviewee says that the group suffers resentment in the university, because the DESIS BH laboratory is always very full of students.
The reasons for this are: they are a small laboratory (there is only one room with a conference table for 8 people) with a lot of demand from students; mentioning that "there are not enough chairs for everybody"; to be a democratic laboratory where all are treated as equals, "there are jealous people. I have no monopoly on ideas; on the contrary, we accept the ideas of the students and even thank them. The team is integrated, the rest of the university is jealous, others colleagues are jealous. Here there is no hierarchy, students are treated as equal. Of course there is respect, but students have the freedom to develop ideas".
According to the interviewee, the fixed team knows that every year they will lose team members (students); but you can only know what to do with projects (of these students) when the other semester begins and the new students arrive. Up until this point, they can only wait until they know who the new students will be, and if they can make adjustments to the projects or if they will have to close them.
According to the interviewee, she learned that "we cannot complain about boredom or a lack of what to do". These changes consume a portion of the period in a very challenging way; the team has to be creative with so many changes. Above all because these laboratories need to reach out to the public in order to have the financial resources for ideas as there is no budget in the labs, "There is no routine. We have to be creative. We never have sufficient financial resources. We expect it to happen one day, but nowadays we don't have them”.
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