Tecnicas de Analisis General (general analytical techniques)

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:

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.

Give people a list of [musicians] and ask them to choose one person whose music they do not know. Their task is to find music by that person online, listen to it, choose one and post a link (or the video/audio itself) in the online group with a comment about the music. Players are then asked to listen to each other's chosen music and add their own comments, to which the original poster should reply.

You can add a layer by asking people to research the background of the musical piece or the musician and post a summary. This can be very good practice for simple citation.

For centuries board games have been used for entertainment, propaganda, and education. Monopoly was based on the Landlord Game, which was designed by followers of Henry George to education people about Land Rent and the single tax. Coopoly is designed to teach the challenges of running a worker cooperative. Some Japanese sugoroku games present bildungsromans or cautionary tales.

Excellent guide to instructions for games:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gv1WqLwVWeagmJiWVuvOeXHbTA4MEpXGV2yV...

Work & Education, Past and Future Sugoroku Process Notes

I learned this from a Japanese popular educator whose name I can't recall. The combination of physicality with abstract thought produces interesting results.

The flow:

Put a disorderly pile of three or four chairs in the center of an open space, with all the participants around.

Announce that the chairs are the theme we want to discuss, for example, "English" or "Democracy" or "Equality".

I learned the game "Tree, Ground, Water" from students who taught a session of our English course at Meiji University.

The process is simple: the joker stands in the middle of a circle of people. S/he chooses one person and says, "Tree" (or one of the other elements). The person she chose then has ten seconds to come up with something that lives in a tree. If s/he can't, s/he becomes the new joker.

When asking people, "What do you see?" I find the question often confuses them. Though I prompt people with Denzel Washington's line in the film Philadelphia, "explain it to me like I'm six years old" people are unsure what is being asked.

It is difficult to describe this activity because it is so rich in content and so great a way to practice "horizontal" pedagogy. It is a mash-up of Jacotot's "What do you see? What do you think of it? What do you make of it?" and ???

Materials: color copies of Miguel Marfán's cartoon on the cover of Técnicas Participativas Para la Educación Popular, with the book title removed.

The flow:

Joker gives people a copy of the Marfán cartoon and ask them to look at it closely. Give them five minutes or so.