Activity

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.

A playful communication exercise.

Participants each write a sentence on a sheet of paper: e.g. "I am hungry" "It looks like rain." "Obama wants to bomb Syria."

When all are done, they pass the paper to the next person, who writes another sentence that says the same thing as the first: e.g., "I want to eat something" "It's going to rain." "The president is talking about attacking Syria." Pass again, and so on, until there are ten sentences, or the paper gets back to the original writer.

Second Thoughts.
Write a one sentence position you feel strongly about, a principle.
Then, write a "second thought" on the same subject. It should be a thought that you feel is valid to some extent.
Then, question that second thought, and so on until you have gone back and forth ten times.
At the end, repeat the initial sentence.
This activity should reveal the complexity of seemingly settled positions, making the writer think about her views.

Example:

• I don't cross picket lines.

Another surrealist game from Alastair Brotchie. This one involves the random creation of definitions.

What is...?

Each player writes a question on this pattern: "What is ----?" (e.g., "What is solidarity?")

The players each fold down their papers so the questions are concealed and pass their papers to the next player who writes a definition on this pattern: "It is ----" (e.g., "It is a scream in the night." or "It is the final resting place of our dreams.")

The first technique is from Alastair Brotchie's collection of surrealist games. The second is a variation on the first. Like all such games, it is important to play them freely, without concern about "making a good one" or being clever. If the players feel free, the results can sometimes be remarkable. We are used to trying to work together rationally, these games ask us to work together irrationally, creatively.

If/Would

In pairs or a group: each person writes the first clause of a sentence, beginning with "If", on this pattern:

I got this from Kani Club.

Three players and an audience (optional).

The scene is an alien visitor being interviewed by someone who does not speak her/his/its? language. So there is an interpreter.

Choose the setting: a TV program, an immigration interview, a job interview, a political meeting, the UN...

Role play an interview with the alien speaking gibberish which the interpreter translates into English. When the interviewer speaks, the interpreter translates into gibberish.

Variation:

Idea for an activity:

Like the mirror game, where you mimic the other person's movements in real time, in this game one person speaks, one sentence at a time, and the listener repeats verbatim what the speaker said, as close to simultaneously as possible.

Maybe start with the mirror game, as a warm-up, then introduce speech. (One might also show the great mirror sequence in Duck Soup.)

The idea is to make the speaker, listener, and referee more attentive to the exact way they are expressing themselves.