(I learned this at Kani Club, the great "Yes, and..." improv group in Tokyo.)
This game, done in pairs, challenges the listener and the speaker alike to clarify the meaning of words and phrases used. Like all games it is, as Huizinga says, "pointless but significant." The fun is in the pointless interruption and unnecessary explanation. The significance is in the verification of mutual understanding of even the simplest terms.
The flow:
I adapted this from Sonya Huber's "Six Degrees" experiment. (She calls activities "experiments" which I like, in her great Backwards Research Guide for Writers; Augusto Boal calls them "games," emphasizing the element of play.)
The John Guare play "Six Degrees of Separation" popularized the idea that each person on the planet is connected to every other person by no more than five other people. Guare used the idea to examine the ties that bind each person to each other person and the play between our unity and our separation.
The idea is to take a random object that is utterly familiar but considered unimportant and use it as an object of learning, finding the connections between that object and ourselves. (Reminds me of Marx's question in Volume One of Capital about how two objects can be made commensurable.)
Step one is just to take the bag and answer the question: What do you see? This step requires time and care, it should be detailed and very specific, a close description, a close reading.
Dedocracia is a pun I learned from activists from the Dominican Republic with whom I used to work. When someone designates the person who has to carry out a particular assignment -- by pointing at him/her rather than voting or reaching consensus -- it's a case of "dedocracia" (the rule of the finger).
But I have since learned about another form of dedocracia: five finger consensus, or "fist-to-five consensus-building." You can read about it here: http://freechild.org/Firestarter/Fist2Five.htm
Adapted from "Broken Squares": Preparing Students for Group Work, from Practicing Collaborative Learning, Maryann Feola Castelucci and Peter Miller, College of Staten Island, CUNY, Dept of English, Speech and World Literature, Winter 1986
NEEDS WORK!!!!! LOST TEXT
Adapted from "Broken Squares": Preparing Students for Group Work, from Practicing Collaborative Learning, Maryann Feola Castelucci and Peter Miller, College of Staten Island, CUNY, Dept of English, Speech and World Literature, Winter 1986
[write up activity in context: how to develop group building skills when collaboration, participation, equality are your priorities, this is deep work, but can be very useful]
Summary:
By Matt Noyes; the cuento vivo technique on which this is based comes from Alforja, Tomo I.
Summary:
Just like the parliamentary procedure that most unions use, in one form or another, an alternative democratic procedure for making decisions needs to be learned and practiced before it becomes efficient. Using a "Cuento Vivo" (live story) technique, this activity has people act out a scene from a union meeting using consensus instead of voting. The scripted parts help people practice the technique and shows how the procedure is designed to work.
Materials:
It's an obvious idea, but seeing video of people using the People's Microphone, I decided to teach the technique in my English for Activists course and use it for language practice.
The Flow
I have been having an interesting time working through ideas inspired by Jacotot/Ranciere in a two-semester course at Meiji University that I call the "learning seminar."
