Drawing

In this chain story-telling game the joker starts off the story with this sentence:
"[Maria] is a teacher." [Any name]

Each participant adds something to the story, either describing Maria or building a narrative.

Like the game "Juan y Juana" in Tecnicas Participativas, the game should produce some interesting elements, a kind of rough image what what we take a teacher to be. This can be made clearer by following with another story, this time starting with "[Maria] is a student."

In his autobiography, Leon Trotsky tells the story of meeting an old electrician and Narodnik named Ivan Andreyevich Mukhin. As Trotsky tells it, Mukhin used navy beans to give a lesson in revolution. As you're sorting out your feelings about Trotsky and the Russian Revolution, consider this learning activity.

Hegel criticized "picture thinking" (vorstellung) as opposed to conceptual thinking, for some good reasons, but learning finds a good foothold in the creation, description, and analysis of pictures. I think this is because we find in drawings elements produced unconsciously, accidentally. And the drawings we create become objects in common -- something we can look at and to which we can refer in our conversation.

This simple activity can be the opening of a long investigation.

By Matt Noyes. (I got the idea from the late Spalding Gray's "interviewing the audience" performance technique, which I saw him perform in Brooklyn's Prospect Park one summer night. Gray circulated in the audience prior to the performance, finding interesting people who he later brought onstage for a rambling, but very entertaining, interview and conversation.)

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