Reading

An idea for an activity to help people think about different ways of organizing information to build understanding of historical events.

Based on the famous speech by the Meiji era Japanese feminist leader Kishida Toshiko, this activity asks participants to create a manga version of her speech, working in teams.

I have spelled out a nine step process, but it might make sense to do a much quicker, rougher version of this, to leave time for other discussions. Steps 1, 4, 5 are essential, I think.

Step one is to read the original essay (for Japanese readers, in Japanese), and do a reader response writing activity.

Step two is to form teams with a mix of self-identified skills/capacities:

Like a nightmare scenario, in this case teams take a given, established object, situation, institution, relationship, saying, etc. and try to disprove it, brainstorming, prioritizing, and presenting reasons why it can not work, be true, etc.

Teams compete to make the most convincing arguments. (Need to think about criteria for a convincing argument.) Can be decided by a team of judges, or by the joker(s).

This game is for practising consensus and ensuring the participation of every player.

Joker gives the same question or proposition to all players.
Every player writes down their answer.
Players then share their answers in pairs. If they have consensus, they then find another pair and try to reach consensus again.
If the pair does not agree, they try to convince each other, or to modify the answer until they can both agree.
The goal is to reach consensus among all the players.

Like Ten Levels of Why, but going the other direction.

Start with the last reason given in Ten Levels of Why.

Spoken version:
The player says her/his sentence out loud, then one person says, "so...?"
The player must give a consequence; "So..."
Then another person asks "So...?" and the player must give a consequence that flows from the previous statement... and so on, until ten so's have been asked and answered.
At the end, the person repeats the original sentence and the tenth consequence.

I adapted these slightly from activities in the book Intraemprendizaje by Iñazio Irizar (http://intraemprender.blogspot.com.es/).

Brainstorm on a given theme from six standpoints. For example:
Love, Hate, Need, Have, Fear, Hope
or
Useful, Useless, Safe, Dangerous, Easy, Difficult
or, using terms adapted from Edward de Bono (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Thinking_Hats)

I adapted this slightly from an activity in the book Intraemprendizaje by Iñazio Irizar (http://intraemprender.blogspot.com.es/).

For collective brainstorming. In groups of four, in four minutes, each person writes four ideas on a sheet of paper then passes the paper to the next person. Repeat until each sheet has ideas from all four people. Repeat as necessary.

Based on a Japanese puzzle game and the famous speech by early feminist leader Kishida Toshiko, this game asks players to identify the obstacles to the freedom of young women and then remove them one at a time.

Making the game is a key part of the activity. In teams, participants:

Brainstorm:

Got this idea from the video The Story of Solutions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpkRvc-sOKk

This basic format is useful in many games.

On the board is written the clue, answer, hint, etc.

The player(s) stand in front of the board, facing their team(s). The team members (freely, or in turns) call out hints and the player tries to guess/identify what is written behind them.

Team members can also do pantomime, or even statues, in lieu of speaking.