Participants engaged with the exercise, and everyone seemed to appreciate the choice of colourful dice and pens to fill out their character sheets.
I feel my experiment was a success and I was happy with the conclusions made by people in the group.
Everyone shared very different stories with their students which was very helpful. And the discussions led to a good point where we arrived acknowledging that we cannot always assume that high achieving students are doing ok. And that a lot of the issues students are facing are out of our control.
There was some concerns regarding the potential of staff making use of problematic stereotypes when doing this exercise. This could be scary for some, but I believe acknowledging friction is important for collective growth. The purpose of this exercise is to reveal prejudice and help each other build a more sympathetic lens when looking at students.
In order to improve, I need to consider the context more and how I introduce it to the participants so that they are more aware of the process as a whole. Generally I would like this to be expanded into a 2 hour workshop so that people can be eased into the idea of roleplaying at a slower pace.
(Character sheets I designed for my exercise)
Key points of learning from other workshops:
One person presented an object in a bag, making us guess what it was by touching it. It added a very nice layer of play that I am now considering to build into my workshops more when teaching ceramics to illustration students.
Another used some very well planned visual aids for typography design. I have never considered using printouts for my own workshops, but the way they presented these worksheets alongside context through speaking was very inspired. Might be able to build this into my comic workshops as it removed a layer of comparison between participants as everyone used the same sheets and was given the same markers to fill in the shapes.
(Typography worksheets designed by Umi)