[tsl/leadership] Fireside Workshop: Race in America
Yesterday, for our first Fireside Workshop of April, we focused on the topic of Race in America. Race isn't often a topic that comes up in Teen Second Life, but as became clear in the workshop, is certainly one that affects the real lives of TSL residents. Over the course of the workshop we did some brainstorming on relevant terms, like power, ethnicity, discrimination and education, and over the course of our time were able to establish linkages between many of these terms. We watched a portion of the recent speech by Barack Obama called "A More Perfect Union", in which he speaks directly to how issues of race manifest in this country, and then played a classic activity we do off-line here at Global Kids, called "One Step Forward", where the facilitator says a statement asks participants to take steps forward or back depending on whether it applies to them. (eg - Take one step forward if you were born in the United States, take one step back if you're from a minority group and have sought healthcare). The activity helps to highlight the opportunities that different people have as a result of their race, gender, sexuality, age, income and other factors.
This activity was particularly interesting to see happen online in Second Life versus offline in the schools we work in. Whereas offline we have many of our students stepping back as we say statements, it was striking to see how often the teens in Second Life were able to step forward, and how powerful it was for many of them to realize how much more opportunity they have than so many people not only in the world, but even in this country. Our team has always been aware that working in an environment like Second Life would mean that we reached a more privileged population, but it was really wonderful to see some of this population realizing that they were privileged, and internalizing this fact to varying degrees.
One of the other things that made this workshop unique was the mode of facilitation. Since spatial voice chat was implemented in SL this past year, we've been experimenting more and more with it during our workshops. Unfortunately, we found that often not every teen in a group would have a microphone, and so wouldn't be able to participate in a voice conversation, whereas others were able to, which created two unequal tiers of participation. So for this workshop, Shawna and I decided to facilitate via voice, and have the teen grid residents respond and communicate just via text chat. We found that this worked brilliantly! All the teens were able to participate on equal footing, and as facilitators we were able to keep the activities more lively, have our instructions be heard more fully and clearly above the chatter, and respond more flexibly than we could via text. Looking forward to seeing if we're successful in trying this in the future!
