These tools are for developing a more rigorous collective analysis of social, economic, and political structures.
One game I learned from the Kani Club improv workshop in Tokyo is Master and Servants. The idea of the game is simple: three players, one is the Master who is constantly demanding things of the servants. When the servants try to meet the Master's needs, the Master is never satisfied and yells at them. For example:
A series of activities for looking at wealth inequality in the US and globally.
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:
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 game comes from Tom Wujec. See his very useful detailed instructions and TED talk. http://marshmallowchallenge.com/Instructions.html
For my purposes, the project serves as an experiment in which people can practice cooperative learning, work, and innovation.
Prep the materials ahead of time.
For each group:
The game Loud & Proud is designed to played as a rapid-fire competitive matching game. http://store.toolboxfored.org/loud-proud/
It can also be played:
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.
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.
