by Jessica Sumney, Graduate Intern
Although our new CommonGround facilitators participate in an intensive weekend-long training retreat at the beginning of each semester, there is always more to learn about facilitating social justice education. That's why CommonGround has dedicated this semester's monthly meetings to exposing facilitators and student coordinators to the activities and exercises available in the IGR catalog.
Student coordinators and programming team members worked together to plan monthly facilitator meetings that incorporated many of the activities used for workshops, such as the American Dream Game, the card game Barnga, and a Dominant Narratives analysis. The Dominant Narrative analysis is particularly notable, as it is a new activity written by this year's programming team. In this activity, participants receive a hypothetical scene that perpetuates a dominant societal narrative, and they must identify both what the narrative is and the possibilities for challenging it.
Due to the success of this activity in the monthly meeting, CommonGround plans to use the Dominant Narrative analysis in future training retreats. This exercise allow participants to delve into questions around social identities and how their views would influence their actions in various scenarios. Through exploring scenarios in a simulated environment, participants gain the knowledge and skills to communicate about social identity in real-world situations.
By allowing our facilitators the opportunity to act as participants in all of the activities, they were able to gain new insight into the CommonGround workshop experience from the perspective of a participant. We hope that this, in turn, will make our facilitators more comfortable with leading activities in their workshops. By becoming more familiar not only with the facilitation style of CommonGround, but also the resources CommonGround uses to facilitate, we hope to train students to be even more effective members of the social justice community.