Activity: Beyond Words: Picturing Our Perceptions

At the first Bay Area Social Equity Caucus quarterly meeting of 2008, Urban Habitat’s Leadership Institute Coordinator, Pam Graybeal, facilitated an activity ‘Beyond Words: Picturing Our Perceptions.’ The activity’s goals were to have SEC members spend a few minutes to take a step back and think about concepts related to the Caucus’ goals and activities in a different way.

Participants were divided into groups of 5 and each person was given a sheet a paper with a phrase written across the top, and asked to quickly sketch an image to depict this word or phrase. After a minute of drawing, everyone folded their papers so that only the drawing was showing (and the phrase was hidden), and passed it on to the person on their left. After being handed a paper with the drawing, they were asked to guess and write down what they thought the image was depicting. After folding the paper so that the image was no longer showing-- but the new phrase was--they again passed their paper to the left. This pattern was continued for another round before everyone unfolded the papers to reveal the entire progression of words to images, to words, back to images, and finally words again.

This was followed by a series of guessing what the image depicted and then sketching the new phrase without knowing what preceded the image or phrase at hand (see instructions below). At the conclusion, we passed the papers around, and people laughed and shared their responses. Members shared which progressions were most striking, true, entertaining, or revealing.

The goals of the exercise were to:
1) challenge participants to find alternative ways to express concepts we encounter frequently,
2) Get a sense of how other SEC members conceptualize these ideas,
3) Prompt discussions about preconceived ideas about sectors and how these notions affect our multi-sector and multi-issue coalition building, and
4) To have fun!

The activity seemed to be a hit, and we look forward to doing it again--with new phrases and more time for discussion afterwards.

To view all of the drawings as a PDF, click here: Picturing_our_perceptions.pdf