I Just Have To Share: From Jim Benson, image by @toddaclark
I book marked this over a year ago and meant to blog it. It is still worth sharing. And as a bonus, I’m slowly chipping away at my blog draft backlog. đ
Source: 9 questions you canât answer when not visualizing your work | get LIT from Jim Bensonâs post.
Last 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
Session 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 weâll do a gallery walk and debrief of the experience. Magic or mayhem? Or both? Letâs 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:
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. Â 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.
Station 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!!)
Station 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.
Station 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.
Station 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!”
Station 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.
Station 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:
For the last 6 years we (Michelle and Nancy) have been leading introductory workshops on graphic facilitation, the use of visuals in group process. Weâve grounded the workshops in basic drawing âliberationâ (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!
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.
Weâll start out in familiar territory getting comfortable drawing â but this year weâll go beyond drawing on walls, and experiment with shared visualization on smaller scale paper and even, if you want, on tablets and ipads. Then weâll 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:
To ground us, weâll 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  weâll 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. Â 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 âdrawing on wallsâ the day before. Â 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 â 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 âpre-dayâ is Sept 15, 2- 6pm
Price: $950 CAD + GST Â (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 White
âI 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/.â
Michelle Laurie
âDespite 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 IUCNâs Commission on Education and Communication. I will be your main contact for workshop logistics.â
To register you must email  michelle.k.laurie(@)gmail.com to confirm your participation, provide your contact details and submit payment.
Payment Options:
â Email transfer â michelle.k.laurie(@)gmail.com
â Paypal transfer â paypal.me/MichelleLaurie (If you prefer to pay in USD, contact NANCY)
â Cheque by snail mail to: Michelle Laurie, PO Box 1063, Rossland, BC, V0G 1Y0, Canada
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!
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:
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:Â Visual Facilitation in Learning – Resource Slides
Rachel Smith on Drawing in the Classroom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tJPeumHNLY
As they say, if I had a piece of dark chocolate for every time that someone has said to me “but I can’t draw” when I ask them to sketch their ideas, or capture some content visually, I’d be as big as an elephant. When I saw this article about Crazy Horse’s drawings of his battles, and the “language of images” I thought “here is a story I can tell back when people say they can’t draw.” There is power in images, no matter how simple or refined.
At first glance, the drawings may look childish. But as Picasso has pointed out, a drawingâs intelligence isnât simply a matter of academic technique. Under McLaughlinâs masterful guidance, we come to recognize that, in fact, the drawings in this book exhibit extraordinary intelligence of observation. Every detail is telling, whether itâs a dragonfly painted on a shield or the way war paint was applied to the horses.
As McLaughlin explains, these drawings are as rich and informative as any Euro-American literary text, although they speak in the language of images rather than letters, and shape reality within parameters set by a very different cultural framework. Itâs a remarkable lesson in the importance of examining something very closely, of learning to look at images in new ways.
via Crazy Horse: leader, warrior, martyr … artist?.
The image from the ledgerbook appears in A Lakota War Book from the Little Bighorn: The Pictographic âAutobiography of Half Moon,â by Castle McLaughlin (2013). Houghton Library Studies 4, Houghton Library of the Harvard Library and Peabody Museum Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.