These are training tools for practicing particular skills needed to think abstractly: description, recall, summarizing.
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".
This well-known game is great for language learning, for modeling participatory learning, and for stimulating thought about a theme.
The flow is easy: the joker stands at the center of a circle of seated people facing in. The joker says, "I have a letter for everyone who..." and adds some description. For example, "I have a letter for everyone who has glasses." The people with glasses then have to move to different chairs. The person who ends up without a chair becomes the new joker.
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.
I learned this from Minami Yoshitaka, Yasuhara Kouhei, and Yamazaki Ryouta in an English class they taught at Meiji University. In this game people compete to create collaborative drawings that illustrate some thing or idea. It could lead very nicely into discussion, especially if the theme is one of relevance to people's lives.
The flow:
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."
Teaching is the best way to learn. Why? Because what we call teaching is usually a combination of actions, attitudes, and responsibilities that make for good learning. The teacher is fully engaged and active, often acting with strong motivation, clear goals, and a sense of responsibility not just for the material and her/his own action, but also for others and for the group as a whole. "Student," on the other hand, often describes a very limited range of activity.
Adapted from "Ten Second Objects" on the Drama Resource website (http://dramaresource.com/games/warm-ups/ten-second-objects) The original activity is great as is:
"Divide everyone into small groups (4-6). Call out the name of an object and all the groups have to make the shape of that object out of their own bodies, joining together in different ways while you count down slowly from ten to zero. Usually every group will find a different way of forming the object. Examples could be: a car, a fried breakfast, a clock, a washing machine, a fire."
Variations:
I learned this game at Kani Club, the theater improvisation group in Tokyo, Japan. The game asks participants to filter their free association through their sense of what others might say. The object is to avoid "idiocy" -- in the sense of being isolated in one's thinking. At the same time, the "idiotic" answers are often reasonable or creative.
Write up use of tag cloud and add this idea: use I love, I hate, etc to process the tag cloud, creating a kind of poem, can have three or four tags for each line, e.g. I love peace, freedom, mountains, chile. I hate militarism, racism, McDonald's, capitalism...
Slam the resulting poems.
Another idea: have people choose own personal key word from tag cloud and then slam it?
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.
