Exploring

Exploring viewpoints, experiences, interests, convergences and divergences enjoys a luxury of the better part of 4 days to unpack.

"Immediately after [gathering], teams begin their work. Aside from meals, an occasional evening plenary, and an afternoon to explore the surrounding area, that work continues for the next four to five days."  [Dyer, Jones et al. (2015), p. 44]

Team roles are loosely defined, and care should be taken to ensure each member has the opportunity to speak and be heard.

"Immediately after the opening plenary, the teams separate to private locations and begin their conversation work. The team leader may act as a facilitator, but the team as a whole determines direction, agrees on process, selects tools and techniques, and so on. Likewise, an individual may take responsibility for notetaking and / or capturing key points (e.g., on a flipchart), or this responsibility may be distributed. Prior to breaks and meals, teams frequently step back to reflect on their progress and to consider adjustments in process."  [Dyer, Jones et al. (2015), p. 44]

To keep track of long period of oral communications, a trail of tentative in-process drawings serve as memory aids.

"We assert that when visual representations function as ‘boundary objects’ they turn situations of disagreement, tension and conflict into collaborative problem-solving discussions. A construct from sociology, a boundary object (Star and Griesemer, 1989; Henderson, 1991) is a tangible representation of dependencies across disciplinary, organizational, social or cultural lines that all participants can modify. It can effectively advance shared understanding when participants can transform the representation to show more clearly their understanding of the dependencies among them and the implications for each participant’s resources, operations and goals (Carlile, 2002)."  [Black and Andersen (2012), p. 195]

In extended dialogues, flipcharts are a low-tech way of maintaining a record of ideas, proposals, conjectures and refutations.

"Specifically, visual products of facilitated processes can serve as boundary objects when they have the following characteristics:

• They are tangible two-dimensional or three-dimensional shared representations (consider a diagram, sketch, prototype model, map, etc. -- these representations can include text but, in our experience, the text is always sparse).

• They portray salient dependencies and relationships among participants’ objectives, expertise, decisions and actions.

• Critically, they can be modified by input from every participant."  [Black and Andersen (2012), p. 199-200]

With a camera readily available on every smartphone, uploading a images of the flipcharts at the end of each day enables ready access of the visual products of the evolving collective progress.

References

[1] Dyer, G., Jones, J., Rowland, G., & Zweifel, S. (2015). The Banathy Conversation Methodology. Constructivist Foundations, 11(1), 42–50. http://constructivist.info/11/1/042, cached on drive.lab.csrp.institute

[2] Black, Laura J., and David F. Andersen. 2012. “Using Visual Representations as Boundary Objects to Resolve Conflict in Collaborative Model-Building Approaches.” Systems Research and Behavioral Science 29 (2): 194–208. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2106.

Topics in the Classroom

For each of four days (i.e. Day 1 Monday, Day 2 Tuesday, Day3 Wednesday, and Day 4 Thursday, teams should upload photographs of flipcharts (or links to any other collaborative materials) to their shared folders in the  2024-Banathy-Conversation classroom:

• Classroom Topic:  F-Brown. Exploring

• Classroom Topic:  F-Green. Exploring

• Classroom Topic:  F-Orange. Exploring

Plenary Process Check-Ins are short (15-minute) meetings led by Conversation Organizers at the beginning of Day 2 Tuesday, Day 3 Wednesday and Day 4 Thursday, to clarify procedures, and ensure each team has materials that support productivity.

Plenary Progress Check-ins are casual (30-minute) meetings on Day 2 Tuesday and Day 3 Wednesday, where each group can briefly share what they're learning.

As a quick reference, the 2024-Activities-Exploring table is also available.