Colombian Hypnosis – activity from Theatre of the Oppressed.
Groups of 3 – 1 leader 2 followers – Leader puts hands out – the 2 others bring their faces close to a hand. The Leader is the puppet master. The followers need to move themselves with the hand. Hands and faces are not to touch. Each person gets a chance to lead for 60 seconds.
Discussion questions with faculty: What did it feel like to lead? What did it feel like to follow? How powerful do you feel with students? How powerless do you feel with students?
Discussion questions with students: What did it feel like to lead? What did it feel like to follow? What kind of leaders did you experience? What does that say about power?
Rank Awarness – activity from Process Work Psychology.
Groups of 3-5. Distribute one playing card from a deck to each person. Suites don’t matter. The group is to collectively make a dinner plan. Each person is to negotiate this plan from the rank of their card and influence the decision making from this given rank.
Discussion questions with students: Interpretation of rank is different for each person. What is high? What is low? Implicit Rank affects how you negotiated the Explicit Rank you were operating with. What are you conscious of? What are you unconcious of/blind to? What identity/ranks affect you?
Workshops with students and staff were very productive. What came up repeatedly in role play is how generous higher ranks played out with Kings and Queens and high Aces offering to fly their group to Sardinia or pay for an expensive meal out to their favourite restaurant. Questions to take away and think about more were about the reality of how ranks play out in our lives – When we have more, are we generous? Or is it easier to pretend to be more giving when we don’t have much? How do we experience rank in similar situations with friends/colleagues/peers? Perhaps we disguise our ranks with people who have more. How have we experienced empathy for our ranks in similar situations?
Point of View – inhabiting a different positionality (in development).
I could give them a choice from 3 fairly current newspaper articles.
They start by reading the chosen article and writing down their response to it.
In groups they pick different positionalities to explore the article. I would identify and choose different people presented in the article and they would randomly pick one. They are then asked to develop a response to the situation in question from the role of the person they picked.
They then share their different Points Of View.
They are then given time to think about whether their initial position on the article has shifted in the process. Do they empathise with the situation any more or less?
The aim of the exercise it to get students to try and inhabit a different point of view – to view a situation by stepping into someone’s else shoes. Can they find empathy in another position? Cognitive restructuring (Borshuk. C, 2017)
Reference: Catherine Borshuk, Managing Student Self-Disclosure in Class Settings: Lessons from Feminist Pedagogy, Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Vol. 17, No. 1, February 2017, pp. 78-86.