An example of group exercises in the first week of the first year at university Recent blog posts

An example of group exercises in the first week of the first year at university

I want to avoid sessions where the arrival at university  will be thrown information at them as they passively wonder around overwhelmed and confused.

 

I want to find a way for them to share interesting accounts of concepts that they are expert in and which can very easily be transformed into academic accounts and skills. 

 

I want to create sessions where the students will be able to share things they know well from their experiential, personal, tacit and embodied knowledge that we can easily transform together to academic knowledge, language, practices, disciplines, methodologies and methods.                          For example:                                   

Death and mourning, funerals , tradition, what is done and how it is done.   How it works in practice?

 

 


Groups of ten to twelve participants - facilitator  

Fist round

1. Ice breaking - hand shake exercise

 

2. Every participant will be asked to prepare a story of how death is being treated in his family, and community: what happens when a person dies, how is he/she mourned, why, what is done, why, how. He/she will have ten minutes to share it with others. 

 

3. Then, after the first round is completed and every participant had his/her ten minutes storytelling, he/she will be asked questions by the others or have his/her story commented or added to.  The facilitator will make sure the ambience is pleasant and there are no personal attacks, arguments and debates. 

4. In the next session simple texts will be brought on the sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and philosophy of death and mourning.  What is death from the scientific perspective.  The texts will be read together and discussed. 

We will read the texts in light of the discussions of personal stories.  We will discuss the meanings of the text, what the author said, the intention of the text, why it was written, we will summarise the text in a paragraph, we will say what we liked in the text and what we did not like, we will discuss the jargon and some of the technical words that appear in the text and apply them to the personal accounts.

The personal stories will be transformed to academic text with jargon from the disciplines.

5. We will write together a simple academic account of the anthropology (culture), sociology (society), psychology (mind, behaviour and mental), philosophy (meaning of life), history (how was it the past) of death and mourning, how was it in the past, what is changing now.  We will discuss the science of dying and death, what happens to the dying person as he or she dies physically and chemically.

6. We will discus how we are doing, what we are doing and why, how to construct strong and convincing accounts and what strong and convincing accounts mean, we will discuss ways of criticizing and critiquing the accounts and defending the accounts from critiques and criticisms.

 

 
Posted by Alon Serper on 20 August 2014 09:00:31


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