Can we actually practice graphic recording after just a 4 hour workshop? Yes! Part 2

Background: This is the second of three posts about some recent visual experiences at the  7th Annual GFRAS Meeting in Limbe, Cameroon, where I was invited as their graphic recorder! As I noted in Part 1, it is a huge investment of resources – theirs and mine – to have me there for the meeting, so I asked if I could also run a short “introduction to graphic recording” the before the event kicked off, and then we could have the participants fan out across the breakouts and field trips to capture sketch notes. This second post in the series shares a few stories and artifacts from the workshop participants about their sketchnoting at the meeting and after they returned home. How are they using their new skills? Part 3 will share the graphic recordings I did with a little reflection on my own process. When I publish #3, I’ll come back and link it here as well!

Unleashed across breakout sessions, field trips and plenaries, many of the participants of our short graphic recording workshop took their pens and notebooks to try and capture the essense of sessions as sketch notes. Remember: these people walked into the workshop with little or no sketchnoting experience. Just a fire in their bellies and a willingness to try.

The first experiments were just with pen, mostly on the small conference spiral note books. You can see the experimentation with how to organize the ideas on the paper and a great deal of courage focusing on the images, not just relying on text.

At one point after a plenary, a few folks stopped by my graphic recording station and we did some mini debriefs and talked about introducing color. The magic was instantaneous… (not that I don’t like black and white, mind you!). Click the images for a larger and fuller view!

By the end of the week, our intrepid team had introduced metaphors and ways to organize space on the page along with some clever extras.

 

But wait, this is not the end of the story! What happened after everyone has gone home? I have two stories to share already (and hopefully I will glean a few more.

Merida Roets, who was also our day 2 keynote and my wonderful roommate at the hotel, was already planning to offer her staff a brief graphic recording session upon her return to South Africa. (I’ll share the capture of her keynote in post #3). They may have wondered what Merida was up to, but she immediately applied her learning to her work with her project developing some learning materials for the South African Sugar Association. She shared an image with me as an example. (I can recommend Merida for both her intelligence and love of chocolate!)
sugar-cane-farmer-in-field
Finally, one of the workshop participants who was already deeply into visual practices for agricultural development, Luke Smith, who is the AgriEdutainment Officer & ICT Director of WhyFarm that originated the world’s Food Security superhero  “AGRIman” as a way to engage younger folks in agriculture , wrote ” I have used the graphic facilitation method with some children in a workshop. I didn’t have all the materials required to execute they way I wanted too. I showed the children  the basics as you showed us in the training. I then gave them the problem of how can we increase food production by 2050 and told them to use the icons, arrows, symbols to come up with a solution.
The children drew there ideas on a copybook page, I didn’t get time to take a photo as the session ran out of time . But I was amazing that some kids drew the ideas of doing farming underwater. I want to try this method again but with flip charts and markers etc. I will certainly capture the use of graphic facilitation the next time. ”

agriman
Agriman

And for a bit of fun

Can we learn graphic recording in 4 hours and actually DO something? YES! Part 1

Rarely do I get to go to an event with graphic recording as my primary duty. It is often an “extra” that I include in my facilitation practice. This year I was invited to the 7th Annual GFRAS Meeting in Limbe, Cameroon as their graphic recorder! Because it is a huge investment of resources – theirs and mine – I asked if I could also run a short “introduction to graphic recording” the before the event kicked off, and then we could have the participants fan out across the breakouts and field trips to capture sketch notes. I can’t be everywhere at once so this gave us some immediate practical coverage, but more importantly, I wanted people to see that this is an accessible, practical and usable practice. This first post is about the workshop itself. Part 2 will share a few stories from the workshop participants about their sketchnoting at the meeting and after they returned home. How are they using their new skills? Part 3 will share the graphic recordings I did with a little reflection on my own process. At the bottom of this post are links to other visual artifacts from the week in Cameroon.

The Workshop

img_20161003_103006995_hdrWhat can you do in just under four hours to help people master the basics of graphic recording? It turns out, you can do quite a lot. I love starting with the fabulous paired drawing activity I learned from Johnnie Moore.  In the debrief it always raises so many useful aspects about how we pay attention to and communicate with each other. It creates some fun and some comfort with taking risks. And drawing for and in front of people can be a huge risk for many of us.

 

 

Then we got into the practice immediately. My graphic recording and graphic facilitation workshops (short or long) always start with liberating our inner artist using an exercise I learned from the fabulous people at the International Forum of Visual Practitioners (I took their GR 101 course years ago!).

The “I Can Draw” img_20161003_112308329_hdrexercise introduces people to simple, body-based ways to draw circles, lines, use color, write clearly and, for extra fun, how using different materials can change and bring a sketch to life (yay chalk and pastels!) It never ceases to amaze me how such beautiful creations emerge, and how empowering this is. The exercise also loosens people’s bodies up to use bolder strokes, bigger lettering and to explore how color can change a visual experience with very little effort.

 

img_20161003_121758496Next we dug into specific skills of drawing people, icons, metaphors and ways to arrange images on one’s paper or note-pad. Because all the work I do with communities, agriculture, development and such, EVERYTHING I work with involves people. And it STILL intimidates me to draw people. We face this head on with simple ways to draw people. Stick figures. Bean people. Star people. Spring people. I loved how Merida immediately riffed on her people to integrate them into the sustainability work she is doing. WINDMILL people!

 

img_20161004_133510By now people were getting excited, so this is when we started playing with icons, particularly icons that relate to their work, world or context. I have a card deck of silly icons I made years ago. I asked everyone to grab one that they attracted them, and then sketch that icon a number of times to build some comfort. People observed each others’ drawings, swaped cards and iterated. I encouraged people to take pictures of icons – theirs or others’ – that resonated for them. This is so often a practice of “see, imitate, iterate and THEN evolve one’s own style”. Some people have a style right away, like Raj. You can see it in the first sketch note he produced the afternoon after the workshop.

Finally, we put everything together and I challenged everyone to graphically record a short talk I improvise on the spot about preparing to graphically record. Granted, I talked slower, repeated things and even offer a few hints, but really trying to graphically record real time for the first time is VERY HARD. It challenges us to a) listen deeply and carefully, b) identify what points are important and should be captured, and finally, c) actually draw them on the paper. The group did amazingly well for such a short introduction.  Afterwards we toured each of the examples, identified strenghts and looked for something new for them to try the “next time!”

Here are some examples of their work. Click to see larger images.

I am the Immigrant to my Neighborhood Crows…

I have been intrigued by Seattle’s crows since I moved here in 1981. They attacked my sons walking to school during nesting season one year and I went out and told them “hey, I’m a mom too. Don’t bother my kids, and they won’t bother yours.” They stopped dive bombing the boys. Since then I’ve been talking to them… in the yard, on the street. The other day one crow was having problems cracking open a walnut by dropping it on the street. I picked up a rock and cracked it open and walked away. These are my neighbors, who I barely understand, but whom fascinate me. I am the immigrant in their neighborhood. Read the article for the science! Beautiful photo from KUOW.

Listener Lauren Linscheid of Seattle sees crows flying every day toward Lake City Way. “I want to know where they’re going and why,” Lauren told KUOW’s

Source: Where Do Seattle-Area Crows Go At Night?

What does “digital native” imply? Just sayin…

F2FtoONlineA quote worth sharing from my blog draft backlog… emphasis mine. Smash stereotypes and remember many roots of learning are social, even online!

During two long-term studies, which looked at learners who had personal connected devices or were using a powerful online learning community, we found that many users struggled to operate the basic tools. Those who were more active users, rather than somehow miraculously working it all out for themselves, in fact belonged to groups of active users among both friends and families. It seems that learning to be a competent user of technology is a social and cultural experience. However, even where the learners were competent users of the device or service, they were not naturally effective learners using technology. Simple things like arranging their work so they could find it again was a challenge and there was no evidence of working iteratively, incorporating feedback from teachers or fellow learners. Searching skills were pretty rudimentary. They did enjoy drill and practice exercises and referred to these as “games” which they “played”.The minority who did use their devices more did also revisit work they had done earlier, including a few who referred back to relevant work in primary school following transfer to secondary. Being able to create, save , share and rediscover their work via a personal device was a game changer for the few who found out how to do these things – but they were a minority and they had help from home and friends, which made the difference. Not much evidence of the “digital native”.

Source: ‘The idea that young people are digital natives is a myth’ | tesconnect

IJHTS: 9 questions you can’t answer when not visualizing your work

I Just Have To Share: From Jim Benson, image by @toddaclark

@toddaclark’s visualization of Jim Benson’s List

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. 🙂

Source: 9 questions you can’t answer when not visualizing your work | get LIT from Jim Benson’s post.