Poster Dialogue
Poster Dialogue asks participants to use words, images/symbols to respond individually and reflect collectively to a series of open-ended prompts. The prompts invite participants to make personal connections between the topics to be explored and their lived experience. The facilitator uses this strategy to assess participant knowledge and opinion.
Visual Mapping
Visual Mapping invites participants to synthesize ideas and generate responses to prompts that are verbal and visible to the whole group. It also allows participants to see where their ideas and responses intersect or overlap with those of other participants. Working collaboratively to organize the group’s collection of responses, participants make new connections between ideas as they discover ways to visually represent how ideas intersect.
Pass the Picture
Pass the Picture helps students engage in close observations of visual texts to form conclusions and reconcile multiple viewpoints. This is a great strategy to promote empathy, critical thinking, and questioning because it examines a single issue or concept from multiple vantage points asking students to think through an issue from many different angles.
Watercolor Conversations
Watercolor Conversations helps students build community and explore the components of dialogue through artmaking. This strategy is great as an icebreaker or to preview conversations about collaborative learning before making a community agreement at the start of a school year.
Sculptor/Clay
Sculptor/Clay is a strategy in which students work together to visually represent a word, idea or character, with one individual serving as the “sculptor,” who moves the other individual/s serving as the “clay,” into position. This activity allows students to safely practice physical interactions and to explore how to build an effective visual representation of their thinking using another person’s body.
Story of My Name
Story of My Name asks students to share the meaning or story behind their first, middle, last/surname or a nickname. This strategy requires active listening skills and verbal communication; it is often used as ice-breaker or introductory activity or to explore themes from literature.
Great Game of Power
The Great Game of Power is an activity that explores representations of power through the construction of a visual image made of everyday objects. This strategy explores the relationship between observation and interpretation through the use of the DAR (Describe, Analyze, Relate) meaning-making routine.
Mapping Geographies
Mapping Geographies of Home invites students to map and perform their literal and figurative understanding of home on an imagined map on the floor. This activity asks students to think about how the construction of home is culturally situated and invites students to engage with and consider multiple experiences, perspectives, and definitions of home.
Role on the Wall
Role on the Wall is a strategy that invites students to infer meaning about a character and to visually map the relationship between characteristics (emotions) and actions (behaviors) onto a simple outline of a human figure. By inviting students to analyze context clues, the group collectively explores and constructs a more complex understanding of the character’s motivation.