[sl/leadership] Fireside workshop: The Race 08
Participants deliberate over the issues, and one shows his support for Ron Paul
This past week we held the first in a series of Fireside workshops titled What's Your Stance?, which focuses in on a selection of presidential candidates to figure out their stances on the issues that teens that participate feel are the most important. We focused on Rudy Giuliani for the first in this series of workshops, and plan to alternate between Democratic and Republican candidates, exploring each.
The approach of the workshop was a unique one, one where I hoped to not only have participants become informed about where a participant stood, but also learn skills relating to finding credible sources online. They were tasked with first voting on what they felt were the most important issues (the options included topics like Campaign Finance Reform, Immigration, Social Issues like abortion, Global Security and others), and then broke into teams go scour the web to find out Rudy's stances on the issues, and include where they got their information from and why they believed it to be credible.
The participants did a great job of finding information on a host of issues, stating Rudy's stances on a number of them (no timetable for Iraq, claims to keep taxes low, little to no sound policy on the environment), but I think that the lesson learned is that it takes a bit more time than we expected to find and source all that info within one workshop (we'd planned for 25 minutes of research and it took more like 50 minutes), so we may need to tweak the structure to cut some of the time involved. We'll be sure to update on what works for future workshops like this one.
At the end of the workshop, we all (well, almost all, there were some protests...) put on Giuliani heads and took a pic together. What a hoot!
