The Interactivity Foundation partnered with the National Building Museum (NBM) to train summer camp councilors how to use IF’s interactive small group exploratory discussion method in their upcoming summer camp. Lauren Wilson, Teen Programs Manager at the NBM, invited us to do the training. She envisioned thoughtful exploratory discussions as a part of their summer camp activities.
Ieva Notturno and Jeff Prudhomme worked with Lauren Wilson to prepare the program and training materials in May. Ieva then trained the summer camp councilors in June. This summer camp will be for teens, mostly high school students, and will take place in July and August 2018.
The training was conducted in three days over two-week period. Like most of our trainings, it focused on learning-by-doing. I began each session with trainees co-facilitating a discussion. This was followed by a 10-minute group debriefing, which was followed by a 10-minute break in which I gave feedback to the facilitators. The 8 trainees facilitated discussions on topics that they thought are likely to come up in their summer camp. The topics were: ‘Public Spaces and Youth: then and now’; ‘Social Media and Youth’; ‘Environment and Environmentalism: then and now’; ‘Power and Privilege and How They Influence the Stories We Tell’.
The trainees also practiced the main elements of an IF discussion, including: how to generate and explore many different ideas; how to involve everybody in the discussion; how to encourage both the thinking of an individual and the thinking of the whole group; how to build on each others’ ideas; and how to do it through an exploratory interactive discussion.
We wish the trainees all the best with the summer camp—and many fun and thoughtful discussions. If you would like to add the IF exploratory discussions to your summer camp, let us know.