Ally workshop/presentation activity ideas

December 1, 2018 5:42 PM

I recently attended an LGBTI+ Ally conference and now need to give a workshop to colleagues. The presentation will be about 50min long, and I am looking for activities to engage the audience and broaden their appreciation of the importance of being an ally.

The audience will be self-chosen (we have a range of workshops on at the same time) and we are all educationalists working with at-risk secondary students. I will have a small amount of funds for activity materials, and would prefer activities that involve discussion, challenging assumptions, and building proactive mindsets as allies to LGBTI+ students (and colleagues). Any and all ideas welcome.

posted by Thella to Education (15 answers total)

Can you contact your original workshop people to give you some ideas?
Can you hire a facilitator from that workshop or a similar organization?

In my experience, workshops like this are 100x better when facilitated by experts. Again, in my experience, people summarizing what they learned often doesn't have the same effect. It might be better to watch a video together and then discuss?
posted by k8t at 6:20 PM on December 1, 2018

I agree that an outside facilitator would be better, but I realise that you may be in a "we paid for you to go to this thing, now you have to do a presentation" situation. What did your workshop cover?
posted by hoyland at 6:41 PM on December 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: What did your workshop cover?
It was a conference rather than a workshop, so lots of discussion panels with some audience questions at the end, and it was geared toward university administrators and equality/diversity representatives rather than teachers of students aged 12-18.

I realise that you may be in a "we paid for you to go to this thing, now you have to do a presentation" situation
Exactly.

Can you contact your original workshop people to give you some ideas?
Heh, I am co-presenting with my boss who is a partner of the organiser, but it is essentially on my shoulders to develop the workshop we are presenting as part of my own professional development. It is, in part, a report on the conference, but I want some activity ideas to stimulate discussion amongst a primarily cis-het group of secondary teachers who rarely think deeply about such things but self-identify as LGBTI+ allies.

One of the key take-aways I got from the conference was that being an ally is not an identity, but an ongoing set of actions. For example, I was teaching with another teacher the other day and, as we left our teaching area, the other teacher said 'bye girls' to the students, one of whom had just been discussing how they were becoming a trans-man and that their preferred pronouns were he, him, etc. I'm seeking activities that can help my colleagues to stop and think about their actions, and how micro-behaviours can have major impacts. So I am seeking activities that can help develop this thinking mind-set. For example, I was thinking of asking each participant to wear a sticker with their preferred pronouns (which will all be cis orientated, but hey). But that's like a 3min exercise with no profound outcomes.

Ideas?
posted by Thella at 7:15 PM on December 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

I've recently been of the mind that pronoun stickers are losing favor. I can't find any of the articles about it but some queer folks find them demeaning.

The Safe Zone, despite having a barfy website, has some training materials.

Some activities.

Everything else I've seen is very oriented toward university faculty and staff. I hope others have some better materials.
posted by k8t at 7:31 PM on December 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

Here is a good post by Dean Spade in favor of using pronouns during introductions at meetings and such.

What about some information on active bystander tactics? Lots of people who would like to do more ally work are flummoxed when it comes to witnessing something problematic, and often people don’t realize there are a lot of potential ways to respond other than directly confronting an aggressor.
posted by diffuse at 8:53 PM on December 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

I would also imagine that folks would benefit from training about privacy. Do the laws in your jurisdiction require teachers to share certain things with parents?
If students are out at school but not at home, how should teachers approach this, especially legally?
posted by k8t at 9:01 PM on December 1, 2018 [1 favorite]

One activity we did at an ally event recently that I found really helpful was an activity practising pronouns. We were instructed to think of a story we could tell about someone we knew well, like "I went to the beach with my brother and..."

Then we had to tell the story to the person next to us three times. The first time using "they/them"pronouns for everyone in the story, the second time using "xe", "xir", and then a third time using any other pronoun set of our choice, except the ones the people in question usually go by.

The idea was mainly to get used to using pronouns we might not have used before much, also to practice using different pronouns from what our first default instinct is for a given individual, which is a useful skill when someone comes out to you as a different gender from what you had thought. But it was also useful to reflect on how it felt using the wrong pronouns when talking about someone, and what insight that gave us into how it feels for someone to be misgendered.
posted by lollusc at 11:01 PM on December 1, 2018 [3 favorites]

From what you've said, I'd focus on the question of what makes a good ally. While it's not an identity, it's also not just a list of actions that people can tick off (which is definitely where the average Mefite is when it comes to trans stuff). Rather it's about knowing when to use your power and privilege to lift people up and when to step back, and how to gracefully be told you've fucked up.

Here is a good post by Dean Spade in favor of using pronouns during introductions at meetings and such.

Do read the article he's reacting to as well. I have a lot of respect for Dean Spade, but I am increasingly of the opinion that cis people inquiring about pronouns is about cis people and demanding that people's genders be classifiable. (Now my own privilege and the peculiarities of my own experience inform that greatly, but nonetheless.)

they were becoming a trans-man and that their preferred pronouns were he, him, etc.

Heads up on language: people don't "become a trans man" (note the space), they "are trans".
posted by hoyland at 4:17 AM on December 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

I suppose I should specify (though we're getting off-topic for AskMe) that my "ugh" about asking for pronouns is mostly about what Spade refers to as "pronoun go-rounds", where people are asked to declare pronouns to a group, especially in cis-dominated or cis-assumed spaces. I'd see that as very different to a teacher asking students for pronouns on an information card at the start of the year (which, yes, is a de facto declaration to the group, but nonetheless) or asking someone privately (which can still be "I demand to know your gender", but can also be "I genuinely want to refer to you correctly").
posted by hoyland at 4:31 AM on December 2, 2018

Another heads-up on language, a lot of us don't feel great about the term "preferred" pronouns, which is only ever applied to people whose pronouns seem weird to cis people.

If you're speaking about identities and experiences other than your own, maybe you at least could show videos from LGBTQI folks talking about their lives and experiences? I find that the biggest barrier to well-meaning cis folks being decent is often that they genuinely don't know how much of an impact their casual transphobia has on us, so if you're able to convey that, that might help.
posted by ITheCosmos at 4:38 AM on December 2, 2018

I just remembered: years ago (it was probably 2007) I did a workshop for (I think) middle school teachers. I honestly remember very little of it except that someone asked "What should I do when I know a student is gay and they're not out?" and we got into this back and forth about whether they could know (probably not for the reasons they thought, but, to be fair, middle school teachers likely do see kids making overtures to each other without realizing they're trying to flirt). I suspect you're going to get a lot of that--I think some student is queer/trans, some student came out as trans but I don't believe them, etc, etc and you may get sucked into a trans 101 you're not equipped to do. I would think about how to refocus these questions on the ally issue--it doesn't matter what they think about an individual student, the question is how to make your classroom welcoming to all students, whether you know they're there or not.

What activities were features at the conference? We may be able to help you repurpose them.
posted by hoyland at 4:55 AM on December 2, 2018

If your goal is to justify the expense of the workshop, and if you want a secondary effect to be convincing them to work harder on their allyship, why not talk about what you yourself learned at the workshop and how you realized your own allyship needed to improve? Teach by your own example the idea that allies always have room to learn and improve, and can't just rest on the laurels of past good deeds.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:03 AM on December 2, 2018 [5 favorites]

You could also go through activities that were grounded in what you yourself learned. But I think being able to say to them "I was wrong about this and I learned something" will go over better than saying "You are probably, without knowing it, wrong about this, and you need to learn something," because that brings up so much shame and defensiveness when it happens around allyship issues.
posted by nebulawindphone at 6:16 AM on December 2, 2018 [2 favorites]

How new will this material/concept be to your audience? If this is introductory, 101-level for most of them, it'll be important to establish why this is even important, and develop some empathy from the start. If that's the situation, something like The Heterosexual Questionnaire can be good for encouraging people to start thinking about what it feels like to not be the "default" or to have the "default" assumed about you until you make the effort to tell someone you're not. It includes questions like: 1. What do you think caused you to be heterosexual? 2. When and how did you first decide you were a heterosexual? 3. Is it possible that your heterosexuality is just a phase you will out-grow? etc.

The exercise is available under a Creative Commons license so it's free for you to use (non-commercially, and with attribution).
posted by rhiannonstone at 10:23 AM on December 2, 2018

Response by poster: Thanks everyone. I probably should have clearer on the fact that our students don't have classrooms - they are students who don't go to physical schools due to a wide range of issues. We go to them in person and/or via technology, teaching one-on-one. Therefore standard school and classroom situations and experiences are not ours.
posted by Thella at 12:02 PM on December 2, 2018