Category: events

Liberating Structures in Higher Ed: Vancouver 2017

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Source: » Liberating Structures 2017 Image by Tracy Kelly

As I noted in yesterday’s post, I’m heading up to Vancouver to co-host a couple of workshops. Besides the VizEd, Tracy Kelly, a great team and I will co-host a two day Liberating Structures immersion workshop February 22-23, 2017 and the early bird rate ends November 15th. So Register Online Now!

This immersion workshop focuses on the appication of Liberating Structures in higher education. Here are the details:

Liberating Structures are a collection of powerful facilitation strategies that can be used in our classrooms, everyday meetings, strategic planning sessions, workshops, presentations, etc.  They are seriously fun methods to engage and work together.

Liberating Structures are small design shifts that move us gently away from more constraining  “conventional structures” (e.g., lectures, open discussions, round robin updates, brainstorms) and toward sessions that quickly foster lively participation in groups of any size, making it possible to unleash and include everyone. 

In the workshop, you will learn how to choose, facilitate, and sequence Liberating Structures for your individual facilitation challenges and contexts.

Who should attend?

Faculty, Instructors, Teachers,  Learning Designers, Leaders –  all who are called to facilitate learning, meetings, sessions, groups, presentations, workshops, processes, communication and change. (I would add learning in and outside of formal educational institutions!)

We will focus on post-secondary education contexts, but colleagues from other sectors (e.g., government, health care, private) are welcome!

Here are some examples of applying liberating structures:

I’m particularly excited by the early conversations with the hosting team, dancing around provocative and challenging issues such as inclusion, indiginization, how people do or don’t see themselves as “facilitators” and what this means in the Liberating Structures context. As always, we will travel both familiar and new territory! Join us!

» Graphic Practices in Higher Ed: VizEd 2017

Source: » VizEd 2017

Happy, Happy, Happy dance! I get to offer a workshop with the fabulous Tracy Kelley of BC Campus in February on visual practices in higher education. (She made the visual above which I LOVE!) AND PSST, the early bird deadline is NOVEMBER 15th. You can read all about it here. It is one of two workshops we are cooking up. The second is a Liberating Structures immersion workshop and I’ll blog about that separately as I want to share some of the planning process.

I’m particularly excited that we are focusing the practice in all sorts of higher education contexts – teaching and learning, administration, design and… well, ANYWHERE! (Yes, all caps. Yes, EXCITED!)

Here is the blurb:

Have you ever noticed that moment when people are talking about something, then they whip out a pen and start sketching? Or when a conversation breaks open because someone goes to the whiteboard and draws something?

We are beings with many senses, but we often forget how powerful it is to make meaning using words and images. There is something so negotiable about rough little sketches that invites us deeper into understanding, instead of trying to “be right” or “prove my point.” Everything becomes just a little bit more negotiable.  This is the power of creating visuals with and for each other.

Join us for a hands-on, full-on day of exploring the opportunities and practices of bringing hand made visuals into our teaching and learning. (P.S. “handmade” can mean electronic too!)

We will warm up with some exercises to banish our inner critics, then explore practices for going visual in our work. Bring your challenges! Bring your ideas!  Bring your inner learner, your inner teacher and your inner child as we explore visual practices together.

What you can expect:

  • Tips and practice for basic drawing skills (Courage! Confidence! Color!)
  • Examples of visual exercises and activities, and where they might be useful in your work in higher education
  • Explore templates for collaborative visual meaning making
  • Experiment with the intersection of group process and visuals

THERE ARE NO “ARTIST” PRE-REQUISITES!

What to bring: 

  • Bring a notebook, your phone (or other camera) to capture visuals that inform and inspire you.
  • You are unlikely to use a laptop during the workshop, but you might like to bring a tablet (and your favourite stylus if you have  one!)
  • Wear your most comfortable clothes and shoes you can get dirty (ink, chalk, etc.)

Register here.

#SKiP16 – My Crazy Experimental Offering on Space, Media and Constraints in Visual Teaming

IMG_20160624_142629841Last Friday was a GAS! I spent the day at Sketching in Practice, an amazing offering from Simon Fraser University and led by the incredible Jason Toal. In my next post I’ll recap more of the event as a whole, but I had an amazing time offering a one hour experimental session in the afternoon exploring the impact of the arrangement of space, offering of media and provision of (or not) of task constraints in how a group works together using visual practices. This is part of my preparation for the workshop Michelle Laurie and I are offering this September in Rossland, BC, My Pens, Our Pens: engagement through participatory visualization. More and more I want more than the visual harvest of graphic recording. I want to really dig into the practices that use collaborative and shared visuals for doing real learning and work. So this was a great opportunity.

Here was the description of the session along with my initial planning sketch:

Session title: What if? An experiment to explore if/how structure, format and media influences our interactions

IMG_20160627_074439769_HDRSession overview: Are you ready to be the principle investigator and subject for a short experiment? Join us in this hands on, fingers dirty, experiment on the impact of structure, format and media influences on our interactions with each other. You will be assigned a cohort upon entering the room, with some degree of instruction and materials. You will participate for 20 minutes with that cohort. Then we’ll do a gallery walk and debrief of the experience. Magic or mayhem? Or both? Let’s explore.

As people entered the room (about 35) I assigned them a number. The stations were preset around the room with a number showing on a card. I gave the briefest of brief introductions, as I wanted this to be about the experience, not explanations. The teams dispersed and upon “go” they turned over their cards which provided a brief set of directions (or lack thereof.) The teams then had 20 minutes. The stations included:

  • Station 1: On the floor, a rich assortment of media, and task of simply drawing with no talking allowed. Media included regular markers, pan pastels and crayon markers.
  • Station 2: On a table, no specified task and use only the media provided (dark and light chocolate bars in a bag!)
  • Station 3: On table, provided media (regular markers and crayon markers), no task specified, team can only communicate by singing
  • Station 4: On table, plan a trip from Vancouver BC to Seattle using only images/no words (but you can talk) with regular markers
  • Station 5: Chairs in a circle, flip chart and pens nearby, task to identify a peer’s challenge and offer peer consultation.
  • Station 6: On table, no directions or other constraints.

It was fascinating to watch. The table with just singing as the team communication directions quickly became a pretty frustrated set of people. One person made an effort at singing, but no one else joined in. The table paper became covered with words and images of frustration, along with some comments on their appreciation of the squishy markers that go on like lipstick. The trip planning team talked about their task. When one person put down the latitude demarcation, the whole flow just burst forward and everyone started drawing. The chocolate coloring folks, after a few moments of disbelief, jumped in and we all smelled the chocolate. (I have to admit, after a while the bars looked less like chocolate than some other substance…) The no directions team started out slow but got into the swing of things with a fairly broad and abstract image.  The peer consultation group did not pull in the flip chart until I mentioned it halfway through but they appeared to be deep in conversation.

After the 20 minutes, teams had a few minutes to identify their key insights, then we did a gallery walk to each station to share insights. It was really interesting.

  • IMG_20160624_142639563Station 1: People for the most part stuck with the area of paper they started with, and did beautiful, amazing images. One participant worked bigger and provided some marks that offered opportunities for connecting the individual areas. The team felt that if they had more time, this integration direction would have really kicked in. There were some comments about how yummy the richness of media were. (PAN PASTELS!!)
  • IMG_20160624_142746673Station 2: The chocolate team had really dirty fingers! Despite the early disbelief, they embraced their medium. I think they also ate a bit of the chocolate, which seemed like a smart thing for me! Again, the initial marks by one member provided the start, role modeling that “embracing.” As we walked from station to station, this sense of the role of the “first person to make a move” proved very strong.
  • IMG_20160624_143702970Station 3: The singing only table had a fascinating discussion about the fear of singing in public and we contrasted that with the fear of drawing in public. We realized that the fear of singing made the fear of drawing seem less intense, so maybe moving people WAAAAY beyond their initial comfort zones (to singing), then stepping back (to drawing) might be a way to frame and reflect on our fears. That said, there were some lovely individual marks on the paper. AND a lot more text than I’ve seen when I’ve done this exercise before.
  • IMG_20160624_142247972_HDRStation 4: The trip planners said they really bonded as a team. They were worried they were going to be broken up to other teams and did not like that idea. Of all the teams, there was the greatest sense of “team!”
  • IMG_20160624_141959599_HDRStation 5: The consultation team had to pull in some additional chairs which were higher than the initial comfy chairs, raising the observation about power as manifest in the set up – the higher chair people felt they had to lean in more, and the lower chairs were perhaps more quiet. That said, they had a productive peer consultation. Visuals appeared to be a minimal part of their experience. It made me wonder about how explicit we need to be with both the provision of visual tools and suggestions for use. They don’t appear to be a default.
  • IMG_20160624_143218959Station 6: One tweet out of the no directions group cracked me up – something to the effect of “this is my favorite kind of direction!” They noted that there was some sense of wanting direction or leadership, but after one person made some marks, again, things flowed. However, they wanted chocolate, so they traded some markers with the chocolate folks.

My sense is that most of the people enjoyed the experience in the end, even if they experienced frustration or remorse that they were not in a particular group. There was a lot of interest in both the dynamics of the space/constraint/media question, but the new element that came up for me was the role of the first mark, who makes it, and how they make it. This sets the tone.

If this intrigues you, consider joining us for the workshop My Pens, Our Pens: engagement through participatory visualization.

Here is the photo set on Flickr:

Exercise: Implications of medium, space and constraints

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:

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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/.”

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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

My Ideas - 38

ISS Fellowship Part 6 – It’s A Wrap!

Just over a week after I returned from Australia, I’m putting the finishing touches on the blog series documenting my ISS Fellowship in Victoria State, Australia. (Part 1, Part 2,  Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5).This last post is to share a few final thoughts and the rest of the photos! (Are you a glutton for punishment? The set below is compiled from all the workshops. I estimate I was in front of over 180 people across 13 events, include a few I had not documented in previous posts. This includes meeting with some of the Better Evaluation team at RMIT, meeting with a group of my long-term edu-network-friends in Melbourne, and a planning meeting with the Chisholm team to collaborate on a project they are cooking up.

It hardly seemed like it was four years ago I was last in Australia. I have deeply benefited from my professional and personal connections made over my 4 trips “down under,” and count many educators and education innovators as inspirations and fellow travelers in this learning journey. Special thanks to Brad Beach and his family, without whom this adventure would have never happened, his team at Chisholm, especially Malcolm Jolly who had to constantly remind me where I was headed next and the topic(!!). Patricia Rogers and Arthur Shelley offered me both friendly home hosting and setting up great gatherings in Melbourne. Joyce Seitzinger set up our great social gathering in Melbourne. And of course, to the good folks at the ISS Institute for sponsoring my fellowship.

All the Workshop Photos: