Reflections from the 2021 Estonia Study Tour Cohort
Hana Saeki
Prior to joining this study tour, I did not expect to receive much deep interactions with the Estonian student as I strongly believed field research could only be fully understood through actually being on the field. However, through this online-based project, I was able to receive much more interaction than I could have imagined. Through the meetings held primarily by students, it gave me the opportunity to exchange viewpoints, compare differences in each of our environments and experiences, and through this, learn from one another on how we could establish a more sustainable life in each of our universities. In addition, as this project focused on the students interviewing each of their faculty, staff, and students, it opened my eyes to the current situation Sophia is in in terms of the level of understanding and awareness towards sustainable actions the university is taking. In addition, it helped me learn how to analyze comparisons, conduct formal interviews, and collaborate with those even if they are online.
Mana Short
Although we were not able to visit Estonia in person, it was still a wonderful experience getting to work together with a group of Estonian students over the Autumn semester on our campus sustainability project. When working on an international group project like this, there are oftentimes challenges with communication. However, in the end, we were able to successfully complete our interviews and make many interesting observations about how the faculty, management/administrative staff, and students at our schools think about campus sustainability. I thought it was particularly interesting to compare the keywords that our interviewees and interview respondents associated with sustainability, as it gave us further insight into the gaps of awareness and understanding between the different actors on campus. I think this project has been very meaningful as a starting point to understand the current context surrounding sustainability awareness on campus and to identify opportunities for future projects or proposals for how our universities can become more sustainable in the long-term.
I hope to be able to visit Estonia and meet the team from Tallinn University someday soon!
Mizuho Kawahata
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic situation, it is unfortunate that we couldn't visit Estonia, however, I think this course is the pioneer of the online project done by students from the two different and distanced countries. In this study tour to Estonia, I conducted a project to investigate the differences in attitudes toward sustainability between Tallinn University in Estonia and Sophia University in Japan. As a result of the project, we were able to compare the results of the two universities, and I think that the process of doing this project was a very valuable experience. The first reason was that it was the first time for me to work on a project with students from a foreign university. It was very difficult to communicate with students from Darin University in English, but I think all the Sophia students helped me a lot. The second reason was that I enjoyed the many opportunities to reach various agreements between the two universities. I think that matching each other's opinions and building consensus was essential to the accomplishment of the project.
I would like to visit Estonia one day and meet the students of Tallinn University!
Yui Nakahara
It was the first time for me to work together with people in a different country so I was nervous to join the project. It was more difficult than I expected to work on the same project in different countries. I think the most challenging thing was working on the same page all the time. Because of the time and language differences, it was difficult to communicate smoothly with them. However, we could keep updating each other by increasing the number of meetings and text messages. Also, other project members in Japan helped me a lot and I cannot thank them enough. Overall, it was a great experience to conduct the interviews and compare the results of Estonia and Japan. From this project, I could learn about people’s awareness towards sustainability and the method of correcting information and analyzing them. I hope I can visit Estonia soon and meet up with our project members!!
Yu Nishijima
It was a great opportunity for me to work together with students in Tallinn University and share opinions about “sustainability”, which I have been interested in. The biggest difficulty for me is communication between students in Estonia and us. We sometimes had different understandings toward this project and couldn’t keep updating information. Moreover, as the communication was conducted in English, I sometimes struggled to understand what others were saying and express my opinions. In spite of these difficulties, it was great to share new information and some problems in the meetings once a week. I could also keep connections with everyone and sometimes feel as if I were in Estonia by seeing snow scenes in zoom and learning Estonian by the students even though I couldn’t visit Estonia in person. In addition, the support from my project members really helped me be involved in this project.
As a next step, I want to find what we can do and move on to next actions towards realizing campus sustainability based on the comparison between both universities and a questionnaire from the students in Sophia.
Kisa Fukuda
Through this project, I had a good opportunity to understand the recognition of sustainability which was conducted at university. The differences between the students' and the president's perspectives were interesting. Also, the methodology of the survey was a new aspect for me. I thought that it is also important to consider how to ask the questions in order with intentions to make interviewees answer easily and without any biases. For discussions with Estonia, it should have been more interactive to discuss both countries' situations and integrate the analysis together. Personally, I felt the difficulty of proceeding with the project with the team since I had merely had the experience of leading the team project. Since there were some misunderstandings for each side of the direction of the project, I felt the importance of making sure of that direction by communicating with each other when we discuss with people from other countries. This time, we were not able to visit Estonia because of the corona, however, I hope I have an opportunity to visit there to interact and observe the actual situation in the country.