These techniques are for uncovering ideology, naming it, and thinking about the role it plays.
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:
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
Sometimes, after a long period of using different ideas and tools, you find how they fit together, like cylinders aligning in a padlock.
Me --> You
My reading of the Marfán cartoon, as a would-be ignorant schoolmaster:
Every activity is a box into which I put people -- of course, as in any game (except the Hunger Games or Battle Royale), people choose to participate at some level, but as Huizinga said about sorcery, that one chooses to be duped, it is a constraint nonetheless. Whether people will "get out" of the activity and, if so, how, is to be seen. My job is to uphold the integrity of the box and support the individuals as they seek their way(s) out.
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.
The Chart:
Spectrum of educational approaches in the field of labor education.
These models are intended to represent three distinct approaches to labor education. They are simplified and incomplete, but should reflect coherent methods that we have experienced in our work. The idea is to use these models to explore how we work now, and how we want to work, where we want our work to go.
For each category, please:
Circle the paragraph that best describes how you do your education work now.
Some problem trees (from around the world):
"Problem-cause-effect tree diagram" from Our People, Our Resources
http://www.iucn.org/themes/spg/Files/opor/fig5_1c.html
Another tree, from Eric Mar's Asian Studies and Activism website.
http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~ericmar/tree.html
How-to description of the problem tree activity, with a link to an image (near the top), from Dublin radion station Near 90.3 FM's Community Media Participatory Learning Manual
http://www.nearfm.ie/plm114.htm
Description of the problem tree activity, from a BBC article about women organizing in Malawi.
