Any game can be more or less free or structured. Paidia is the quality of openness, freedom, possibility.
Another game I learned at Kani Club, the improvisation group in Tokyo where I have played many great games and come to appreciate the underlying "Yes, and..." approach. In Japanese, a person who can't understand situations intuitively is said to be unable to "read the air": 空気読めない. In this game, people take turns pantomiming a series of short narratives with the goal of keeping the "reading" intact even as the details of the narrative change.
The flow:
I came up with this in a Field Study course in which I took at group of students to NYC to study unions and workers centers. The students had no experience of unionism, so we needed to come up with a working definition of "union" so that we had a common basis for discussion. (As opposed to me just explaining what a union is, or given them someone else's definition. - What's wrong with explaining? Read on.) This activity gave us a great starting point for our discussion and it captured something essential about unionism and any social movement: the need to constantly reinvent and reimagine.
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.
This is not so much an activity or technique as a policy. But, it has implications for facilitation and for participants' actions.
At the outset of a course or workshop, as part of my self-introduction, I explain that there is one general rule that is very important to me, that is that everyone should feel free. (This is constantly evolving as I learn more about what feeling free can mean.)
The spiel:
People should feel free to be comfortable:
