Category: engagement | Page 11 | Full Circle Associates

My Pen, Our Pens: Engagement through Participatory Visualization Workshop

For the last 6 years we (Michelle and Nancy) have been leading introductory workshops on graphic facilitation, the use of visuals in group process. We’ve grounded the workshops in basic drawing “liberation” (I CAN DRAW), dipped into graphic recording and finished with examples of visual practices in group process. Last year Michelle took that on solo and will lead RosViz 16 again. If you are looking for a great entry point into graphic facilitation, JUMP AT THIS OFFERING for September 19-20, 2016 in Rossland BC. Add a few days and enjoy the stupendous beauty of the area!

I am grateful Michelle took RosViz on, because in true restless Nancy form, I was ready to do something new, to push my own boundaries a bit further. Often that means WITH YOU! So I wanted to share our individual and collective offerings, this year in September in Rossland on September 16 and 17. Michelle has all the details on her blog about both offerings. And I want to add to my American friends, with the Canadian rate exchange, this is a good deal!

Now, the new offering, which maybe is a workshop, but I also think it is a do-shop, a think-shop and a play-shop!

My Pens, Our Pens: Engagement Through Participatory Visualization

September 16-17, 2016, Rossland, BC, Canada

This year we are ready to push ourselves into some new territory from our practices and from the inspirations of other practitioners we follow and admire. We invite you to join us in this exploration.

For 2 days we will explore, share and practice participatory visualization practices which support group process. From templates pioneered by leaders in the graphic practitioner fields to ones we create on the spot, from visual exercises designed to promote relationship, thinking and sensemaking, to collaborative and collective visual harvest practices designed both for sensemaking and knowledge sharing.

We’ll start out in familiar territory getting comfortable drawing – but this year we’ll go beyond drawing on walls, and experiment with shared visualization on smaller scale paper and even, if you want, on tablets and ipads. Then we’ll progress through a series of exercises and experiments alternating with reflection and harvest. At the end of the 2 days you will have experienced, experimented, facilitated, reflected and made sense of how visuals can be part of participatory and engaging processes in your work.

This is not your traditional workshop. We are looking to push our boundaries (and yours) in terms of the role of visuals in design and facilitation. We will ask hard questions about who captures content and what is its use? Can visual methods help in developmental evaluation and results communication be more meaningful? What is the role of metaphor? It’s constraints? Where are there visual opportunities in process design? When does it make sense to use visuals and where does it detract from the process? What is the process of participatory capture and harvest of content? What are the power dynamics? How do we use visuals with approaches such as Liberating Structures?

Here are some of the themes we are exploring:

The Influences of Different Modalities and Constraints on group interaction: opening possibilities
Metaphor: friend and foe
Visual Practices for Strategy/ Assessment / Evaluation: engaged and effective
Visual Reflective Practice: personal and group
Visually Communicating With Our Teams: shared language and attention
Building a Visually Grounded Facilitation Practice (tools, resources, etc.): stuff you can use right away

To ground us, we’ll send you some readings and maybe an exercise or two in advance to jump start our time together. I have been curating some very cool stuff! Because this is an exploration, we want to look inward AND outwards, so we’ll actively share out to the world what we learn.

Who is this for? We invite everyone, from beginners, to RosViz alumni, to seasoned practitioners to join us. You are welcome to bring favorite drawing materials and electronic devices. We will provide with a drawing journal, a set of marker pens, a sketchnote pen and 2 different colors of pan pastels with a sponge. You will have access to loads more materials to play with and use throughout the workshop. If you know us, you know there will also be healthy snacks and chocolate. We also host a very active online community of practitioners to support your practice and learning after the workshop.

Visual novices or those wanting to brush up on their drawing skills will be invited to an optional pre-session of our more traditional “drawing on walls” the day before. There is an additional fee and it includes an additional set of chalk pastels. However, this is not required and will only be offered if we have 4 or more interested people.

Dates: Sept 16, 8-5 & Sept 17 – 8-3

(Please arrive the night before if flying in. We end at 3pm on Sept 17 so people can catch flights home)

*Getting started drawing on walls optional ‘pre-day’ is Sept 15, 2- 6pm

Price: $950 CAD + GST (Intro to Drawing on Walls + $300 CAD)

*Early bird discount $800 CAD + GST (register and paid by July 15th)

*Bonus: Three or more from one organization, 4th comes free!

Location: Prestige Hotel Ballroom, beautiful Rossland, BC

Meals: All meals on your own. Rossland has several beautiful cafes and restaurants to enjoy. Healthy snacks, chocolate and drinks are provided throughout.

About your hosts:

Nancy_facilitatinggroup_circle

Nancy White

“I am a learner, mom, gramma and chocoholic. I founded Full Circle Associates to help organizations connect through online and offline strategies. My practices are diverse, including online interaction designer, facilitator and coach for distributed communities of practice, online learning, distributed teams and online communities, doodler and visual practitioner. I have a special interest in the NGO/NPO sector and the emerging practice of using communities and networks for work and learning. I blog at http://fullcirc.com/wp/, teach, present and write on online facilitation and interaction, social architecture, social media and visual practices. I am co-author with Etienne Wenger and John Smith of Digital Habitats: stewarding technology for communities. Lately not only do I like to draw on walls (graphic facilitation), but I spend a lot of time playing with my granddaughters!!! For more about my visual practice see http://fullcirc.com/wp/about/visual-and-graphic-work/.”

Michelle Laurie

“Despite being an analytical person, I have found that visuals have brought new meaning to my practice as a facilitator and communicator. Typically I explore the interface of environment and development via strategic planning, assessments, facilitation and engagement. Lately my work has focused on supporting organizations to transform their ideas for positive change into realities on the ground. I incorporate visuals wherever I can particularly with the use of participatory graphics, templates, animation and reporting. I also use visuals in my personal life for planning weddings, family activities and travels! I am an associate with the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a member of the International Association of Facilitators, the Canadian Evaluation Society and IUCN’s Commission on Education and Communication. I will be your main contact for workshop logistics.”

To register you must email michelle.k.laurie(@)gmail.com to confirm your participation, provide your contact details and submit payment.

Payment Options:

– Email transfer – michelle.k.laurie(@)gmail.com

– Paypal transfer – paypal.me/MichelleLaurie (If you prefer to pay in USD, contact NANCY)

– Cheque by snail mail to: Michelle Laurie, PO Box 1063, Rossland, BC, V0G 1Y0, Canada

If Teaching is Relational, How Does That Inform Online Teaching?

I was in my car the other day, thinking about all the workplace learning projects I’m currently involved in. At times, I feel like I’m moving a giant rock up a hill, with gravity being “lets push content to our learners.” I keep pointing to the importance of practice, context, reflection, informal learning. But I realize I have not sufficiently highlighted the importance of teaching as a practice about relationships. About being human. About, liberation and yes, about LOVE.

On our local public radio station, KUOW, ran a story about Nate Gibbs-Bowling reflecting on segregation in Washington state schools and what he is doing about it. At the core of his thesis was that teaching was relationship centric. His success with students of color was not dependent on his subject matter expertise, but his relationship with those students. If you have five minutes, take a listen: Washington Schools Are Segregated And That’s Not OK | KUOW News and Information

Nate’s experience in K-12 education rang a bell with me in my experience with workplace learning. To get the engagement that leads to gains in the application of learning, I use two things. The first is to work as hard as I can to make sure the learning offering has real, applicable relevance to the learner in doing their job. The second is to get to know them and use that relationship to engage with the learners to co-discover ways to liberate the application of the learning.

So if we believe (and hopefully can prove) that teaching is relational, what does that imply for online learning and teaching online, especially the proliferation of self paced, content centric elearning? Or worse, online teaching as enforcement and control.

It means we have to challenge the status quo of content-centricity! This does not mean throwing out content, but it means starting with relationship in the appropriate contexts.

My friend and colleague, educator Brad Beach of Australia and I have been having a years long, very slow conversation on what unlocks learner engagement online and if it varies by domain. I have changed a lot of my thinking about online interaction over time, both as I’ve learned and the environment has evolved, but one thing has always been central. Treat people like real, human beings. Use what the Dali Lama calls being “heard, seen and loved.” We may use the word “respected,” but I think it really is about love. But suit yourself! 🙂

A week ago during one of these conversations (they usually happen very early my Friday morning, Brad’s late Friday night) Brad came back again after working with some folks trying to do more vocational education online, with, as they call them in Australia, the “tradies.” He said “Nancy, you were right.” There had been a lot of push back that tradies don’t hew to this idea of relationship building online. Well heck, they do. It might look and sound different, that’s all.

I asked him, “so what does that say about the facilitation of online learning?” Brad, smart man that he is, answered “it is about good teaching. Period. Online or offline.” And together, our experience tells us that good teaching is, among other things, relationship centric.

Relationship Centric Practices in Online Teaching

So let’s name some of these practices. I’ll share a few of mine. Please share some of yours in the comments.

Bring your whole self. A workplace learner is juggling many things. Compartmentalization takes more energy to maintain. Bring a little bit of who you are, and find out a little bit of who they are. This helps identify opportunities to liberate learning, often in unexpected ways. For me, a little goofiness goes a long way. Just a little bit.
Bring your unknowingness and curiosity along with your knowledge. As adults, we are co-learners. We learn with and from each other through our conversations, activities and reflections. If we are “know it alls” we often block this co-learning.
Bring human expression into all forms of communication. Use text based body language. (I’m jumping up and down in my chair as I read your response!) Add pictures and images (even silly little sketches) that not only contextualize the content, but our engagement with it and its application in our lives.
Keep the content tap turned to low. This is really, really hard for me. Look at the length of this blog post. I’ll be working on this until the day I die. But pouring more on rarely is the key to engaged teaching and learning.

What do you suggest?

Edit on 2/11: Some related links:

http://durffsblog.blogspot.com/2016/02/erasing-distance-and-time-educ-8842.html – make sure to read down to the comments.
http://ctl.mesacc.edu/crossroads/ Resources for matching tools to learning needs

So You Want to Host a Web Meeting? A Resource

A long time ago in a planet far far away, a group of people asked if I could share some of my web meeting tips. I have a lot of tips, most of them learned from many many colleagues from all over, both from watching the masters work and from resources they have created. Finally, I got around to starting the project. It was supposed to be a “tip sheet” of 1 page, both sides. hahahahahaha…

Because I love my smart friends like Pete Cranston (the instigator, I might add) http://uk.linkedin.com/in/petercranston, Susan Stewart http://guidedmeetings.com/ and Bonnie Koenig http://www.goinginternational.com/about/, I started a google doc. They added ideas, and I started writing. You can see the genesis here.

Many pages later we have So Yo Want to Host a Web Meeting? I hope you find it useful, and as always, I welcome comments, suggestions for improvements, additional resources, and catching me if I did not attribute properly. The latter was very difficult because so much of this has been learned along the way and ingrained into my practice. The challenges of standing on so many shoulders!!

Edit: 2/17/16 A great pre-webinar activity for when people are logged on and waiting for the meeting to begin from Rachel Smith at The Grove: http://www.grove.com/pdfs/Do-Nows.pdf

Unleashing Joy Through Visual Facilitation – Part 4 of ISS Fellowship

This is the fourth in a series of posts about my ISS/Chisholm Fellowship in Victoria State, Australia. You can find the previous posts here: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. While I intended to write these WHILE in Australia, it has, er, ahem, taken a bit longer.

When Brad Beach (of Chisholm) and I were noodling on what I might share through my fellowship, I was exceedingly happy that he was willing to step out of the more traditional practices and dive into visual or graphic facilitation. We scheduled two rounds of a 3 hour “Doodle, Draw, Learn” workshops to introduce teachers to the power of visuals for engagement and learning. I think we accomplished this well in the workshops. They also reminded me of something else that happens when we allow ourselves to freely draw. Joy fills the room.

As before, I’ll share the content points first as reference, then reflect on my experience and share a few words from the participants. Finally, there is a visual artifact at the end with resources, support materials and a deck compiling all the images from the day.

The structure of the workshop is designed around modeling an interactive initial engagement visual activity, unleashing of drawing joy (“I CAN DRAW”), development of icon skills and wrapped up with another visual activity, this time focused on reflection and evaluation. The agenda is communicated using a visual agenda (of course, and from the photo, you can see this works even on wrinkled flip chart paper) and the feedback is captured with video – another visual medium. In the middle I share example visual artifacts and offer a few thoughts so people can get off their feet and rest for a few minutes. This is where we begin the conversation about where to apply visual practices in the classroom – online or offline.

All in all, this is a very ACTIVE experience. But people generally report being energized, rather than exhausted. Interesting, eh?

Process

Here are brief descriptions of the exercises, in case you want to try them:

Paired Drawing: I learned this from Johnnie Moore www.johnniemoore.com/blog/archives/000380.php and have blogged about it. One pen, one paper, two people taking turns drawing a face, one pen stroke at a time with NO TALKING. There are so many ways to relate this activity to your teaching or meeting goals. It is great not only to “break the ice” but to show patterns of communication and collaboration and the interesting effect of assumptions! More photos here.
I CAN DRAW: This is again a common and fabulous activity that is used in MANY introductory graphic facilitation workshops. I learned mine from the folks at the International Forum of Visual Practitioners (IFVP) and have seen it done many times with amazing variation. The essence is getting up at a wall and using our bodies to draw circles and lines, play with color using chalk pastels and finally getting a sense of the basics of lettering, including size and proportion.Pastels are messy, but they are MAGIC. Something always happens in the room when we use the pastels. I think this is where the joy really becomes visible.
Visual Vocabulary: This exercise builds off of the circle, lines and lettering of “I CAN DRAW” and introduces basic human forms (stick person, bean or shapes, springs, etc.) I reference heavily the work of people like Dave Gray, Austin Kleon and others who have generously shared exercises, videos and how-to’s online. You see examples of the resources in the slide deck at the end of this post. OH, and I role model imperfection, believe me!
Icon Jam: We follow the vocabulary exercise with a quick round of icon jamming, an activity I learned at an IFVP gathering. I start by calling out a word and asking people to do a quick “telegraph sketch” of the word. Then after a while they call out the words. In one workshop I had them label their icons as a future resource. In the second one, I had people move from paper to paper to both see other’s work, to experience what it is like to “draw on someone else’s paper, and to guess the meaning of the icons. I liked this variation a lot. You can find examples of past workshops here, where we often do this on 3×5 cards
River of Life: This exercise uses the visual metaphor of a river or a road to stimulate reflection of the past, present and future. In the workshop, the prompt for the past was “what did you expect coming into the workshop.” The present prompt was “what did you learn and experience today.” The future prompt was “what is your next step using what you learned? What more do you want to learn?” Read more at http://www.kstoolkit.org/River+of+Life and more visual examples here.

Application

In the two Chisholm workshops the educators talked about a variety of ways to apply this. There were the expected elements of using visuals to be welcoming and break up text. They spoke of not only the power of visuals, but the power of beauty, as they surveyed the beauty that came out of the “I CAN DRAW” exercise. A few mentioned the utility for working with their more challenging, younger students. Some had to let it sink in, as thinking about visuals in online learning where text has been the dominant form, may take a while.

One of our “non Chisholm” participants, Joyce Seitzinger talked about how she will incorporate more visual activities in the “Learner Experience” workshops she is designing.

Reflections

My key learnings from these workshops affirmed or developed the following ideas:

I can get over my attachment that the “I CAN DRAW” exercise MUST be done on large scale paper. We basically had paper that was flip chart sized and I think it still worked. You can’t quite get the full body experience, but it works. This is important because it is hard to find rooms where there is space and permission to do large scale drawing on paper on the walls.
Don’t underestimate joy. Make space for joy. Liberate joy!
I still would like to find a way to show and practice some of the online options even in a short workshop. I have struggled with this because I feel the foundational experience of working on paper is a must.

Video Harvest/Feedback:

Finally, I decided to try some video feedback vignettes. After I made this video, I realize it missed half the content of the workshop, so I’ll need to do a second try. I’d love any feedback to help me improve on the next iteration!

Slides with Resources: Visual Facilitation in Learning – Resource Slides

Rachel Smith on Drawing in the Classroom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tJPeumHNLY

Cookie	Duration	Description
cookielawinfo-checkbox-analytics	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-functional	11 months	The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-others	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance	11 months	This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy	11 months	The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.