CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, LONG BEACH

Geography 558: Hazards and Risk Management

Guidelines for Collaborative Group Project

A major assignment in this course is the preparation of a collaborative research project on an emergency management and disaster planning situation that could pose major incident management headaches if not considered thoroughly ahead of time. The project has several learning outcomes:

• becoming deeply familiar with a particular hazard
• becoming conversant with emergency management and disaster planning situations it poses
• sharpening your skills for working in teams, which is a common feature of the working life of emergency managers, first-responders, geographers, environmental scientists, and planners in government service, the corporate sector, consultancies, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and education
• acquiring strategies for working with others of varying abilities and motivations to pull off a high caliber product
• developing and sharpening skills at presenting research succinctly and effectively in a public forum

Possible topics:

• Creeping onset disaster and humanitarian crisis: 2011-12 East African drought
• Some warning/prediction: Alberta, Canada, wildfires of May 2016
• Some warning/prediction: Typhoon Haiyan, November 2013
• Some warning: Cedar Fire, California, 2003
• Some warning/little notice taken: Vajont Dam disaster, Italy, 1980
• No warning disaster: Sylmar (San Fernando) earthquake of February 1971
• No warning disaster: Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, Fukushima nuclear disaster
• A specific emergency management problem that may affect multiple types of hazards, such as:
  • Managing (large, dangerous) livestock or, more generally, animals kept as pets in an evacuation emergency
  • Managing high security prison inmates during a disaster that requires their evacuation to another facility
  • Reaching out to already homeless people during an emergency
  • Getting out ahead of disaster cascades: secondary disasters (e.g., toxic releases, dam failures) triggered by a primary disaster (e.g., wildfires, earthquakes).
• Or???

The final report should cover the following topics (probably in different proportions, depending on the topic and interests of the group):

• The physical or biological dynamics underlying the specifc hazard that caused your disaster (e.g., flood magnitude and frequency patterns, meteorological and edaphic [soil] conditions that trigger flooding, landslide origination, epidemic etiology, etc.)
• The social dynamics that put people at risk in general and worsened some specific groups' vulnerability to the event
• The structural mitigations that may have been put in place to reduce risk (especially if any of them, in fact, backfired)
• What sorts of preparednessplanning measures had been put into place ahead of time (if any), in order to help protect people before or if disaster strikes?
• What was the societal response to the disaster? What resources were brought to bear on emergency response, restoration, and reconstruction? Which agencies responded? How effectively was the emergency managed in terms both of efficiency and equity?
• What recommendations/lessons learned/take-away messages do you have to create resilient and sustainable communities that can mitigate and/or withstand an event like this and recover from it next time?

The report will probably need about 6-12 pages of double-spaced text to develop properly. The report should be prefaced by a one page or so "executive summary" and bulleted recommendations. Please include maps, graphs, and tables, which can be set in the back of the report as appendices unless they really work better inside the text. References can include popular, web, book, government documents, and newspapers, as well as refereed literature, as long as they are properly credited: There is no set balance among these sources of information, as there is for your individual critical review. The idea is to create a report targeted to a variety of practitioners in different fields and the interested lay public, who will need to work together to get through a disaster like this in their communities.

Each group will present its work to the class in a BeachBoard Online Rooms/Collaborate virtual room. The presentation should go no longer than fifteen minutes (aim for about ten twelve) and should be illustrated with viewgraphs or videos that can be shown on the "whiteboard." The presentations will be archived online for passive viewing and asynchronous response.

Each student will be assigned to a particular group (probably three in a team), such that each group will be reasonably well-balanced in skill sets and working styles. Once the groups are assigned, each will be given a discussion forum area in BeachBoard's Online Rooms, so that they can arrange to "meet" and collaborate at their mutual convenience.

It is up to each group to allocate who does what to get their project done. In some past groups, everyone has worked comfortably with everyone else on all aspects of the project; in others, each person is responsible for a particular facet of the project (e.g., any data processing/statistical analysis, mapping, writing, library research, presentation). In the final presentation, each group may elect to have each person speak for a portion of the talk or elect one person to do all the talking (which means the others do more of the work in another area). It is each group's decision, but I need to know from each group who was mostly responsible for which part of the project.

When the final project is presented and the report turned in, I need each participant to rank all participant' contributions (including their own). Give everyone a number between 0 (for completely useless, missing in action) to 10 (superheroic efforts to carry off most of the project). The average score MUST be a 5, and no two people may receive the same score, even if they were virtually identical in performance. So, let's say yours is a well-functioning group and everyone contributed close to equally to the final product. In that case, you'd assign a 4, 5, and 6 to each person (sum = 15; 15/3 = 5). Let's say, instead, that your group had some major dysfunction. Perhaps one person was a complete slacker, and the other two about killed themselves to do their work AND that of the freeloader, too. In that case, you might give a 0 to the slacker and then a 7 and an 8 to the other two people (sum = 15; 15/3 = 5). Another situation can come up if two people are kind of lazy and the third person does heroic work to save the project. That person might be given a 10, and the other two a 2 and a 3. Again, this would sum to 15 and average to 5.

If I see the signs of a functional group, with scores in the 4-6 range, I would simply give every person in the group the grade the project itself earned. I've even seen really harmonious grops "conspire": "I'll rate myself a 4 and you rate me a 6," with everyone taking turns at the 4, 5, and 6. If your group is that harmonious, your obvious little conspiracy will let me know that, indeed, you all shared alike. If I see the signs of a troubled group, however, and the same person is identified as a slacker or the same person is identified as the heroic (perhaps codependent) party, I would adjust individual grades to be one letter grade point lower or higher than the group grade.

Peer evaluation of this sort is very uncomfortable for most students. It is, however, an important skill to have in the professional world, where you may be doing personnel evaluations at much higher stakes: Someone could lose his or her livelihood because of your assessment, rather than just a grade on an assignment. So, the point of this peer evaluation exercise is to help you develop the objectivity to do such uncomfortable assessments as fairly as humanly possible.

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Last revision: 05/07/16