INTERACTIVE ACTIVITIES

1. The Exercise on Stereotyping

INTRODUCTION
"We know that conflicts in relationships are often fueled by distorted perceptions that people hold of one another - by assumptions people make about others who don't share their views or their culture or their experiences. This is certainly true in when we consider the different cultures of our youth, adults and elders. Each of us would like to feel less stereotyped by the other age groups. We'd like to lead you through an exercise that will allow you to communicate in what ways you feel stereotyped and or indicate which of those stereotypes are most inaccurate or hurtful."

GENERATION OF LISTS
TIME: 15 minutes (in subgroup)
INSTRUCTIONS: We'd like the youth to gather around this easel and anyone who considers him or herself an elder to gather around that easel. The rest of you adults please gather around this easel. Your task is to generate on the newsprint at least 8 stereotypes that you think people of the other age groups hold of you. That is, when someone of another age group might be listening to your ideas on youth-adult communication, what negative attributions do you worry that he or she ascribes to you? What stereotypical beliefs, attitudes, and intentions do you imagine you are assumed to have? You will have 15 minutes to do this. You might want to start with a rapid brainstorming of many stereotypes, then sort through and identify several that are somewhat discrete. One of us will facilitate this process in each group. At the end of the 15 minutes we'll ask you to pick one of your group members to report on the list to the full group.

MARKING THE LISTS
TIME: 5-8 minutes (in subgroup)
INSTRUCTIONS: Now we'd like to give you an opportunity to reflect on these stereotypes and think about which seem most inaccurate in your view. Which is most painful - which of these really hurts - to think that someone thinks this of you. We'd like each of you to put an "I" next to the 3 stereotypes you feel are most inaccurate. Then put a "P" next to the stereotype that is most painful or offensive. Finally, we'd like to invite you to put a "U" next to the stereotype or stereotypes that you think are most understandable- by doing this you're not saying it's true of you; you could be saying only that this is a stereotype your movement does too little to correct. This category is an option - we'd like to encourage you to give it some thought. Before any of you approach the easels, please take a minute to think. Then go up when you're ready. When you have finished marking the lists you'll pick a recorder to report to the other group on what the feared stereotypes are, what marking were made, and, if you'd like, you can say something about how the process went.

GROUP REPORTS
TIME: 8-10 minutes (in the full group)
INSTRUCTIONS: Now is the time for each group to report to the other. Each group has been invited to share not only the lists and the markings but also something about the process.

SHARING ABOUT THE MOST HURTFUL STYEREOTYPES
TIME: 20 minutes
INSTRUCTIONS: We'd like to have each person take the opportunity to say - again you can pass if you'd like - something about the stereotype that you marked as most painful. And to say what it is about the way you understand yourself, the way you know yourself, what is it about your experience that makes the stereotype that you marked as the most painful, so painful. We'd like you to share just a couple of sentences. Again, what is it about how you understand yourself, know yourself, and understand your experience that makes one of these judgments or distorted perceptions so painful? This time, instead of doing a go-round, we'll do what we call the popcorn format, which means, that you can speak when you feel ready. And then, when we get close to the end of our time, we'll check and make sure everybody who wants to speak has a chance.

2. The Exercise on Stereotyping: The Individual Version

INTRODUCTION
Stereotyping has played as important a role in youth-adult communication difficulties. We would like to give you an opportunity to address this dynamic directly and to speak about the ways in which you have felt stereotyped by those who come from different age groups.

INDIVIDUAL REFLECTION AND LIST GENERATION (individually) When someone of another age group who holds a different view about youth issues, what negative attributions do you think he or she is likely ascribe to you? What beliefs, attitudes, and intentions do you imagine the person assumes that you hold? Please make a list of 4-6 such stereotypes not worrying for the moment about how much truth (if any) there is in those stereotypes.

MARKING THE LISTS (individually) Reflect on your list and consider the following: 1) which one or two statements are the most inaccurate as applied to you? (Mark with an "I") 2) Which one stereotype would you find to be most painful or offensive if someone applied it to you? (Mark with a "P") 3) Which stereotype on your list, if any, do you think is understandably applied to you, even if it is not fully accurate? (Mark with a "U") SHARING (in full group or diverse subgroups of 6-10 participants) Painful Stereotypes: Please say something, if you wish to, about the one assumption or stereotype that you would find most offensive or painful if applied to you and then say how you understand yourself, know yourself, or understand your experience that makes this stereotype so painful? Inaccurate Stereotypes: Are there any inaccurate stereotypes on your list that you'd like to speak about, again, indicating how you know yourself to be different from what these stereotypes would suggest about you? If so, please share something about the stereotype and how you understand it to be inaccurate. Understandable Stereotypes: Many stereotypes have some degree of truth - even if very small - for some people and age groups to which they are applied. It can be helpful for people with different perspectives to "own" some aspects of their views about which they are less than proud, or that they feel comfortable with but which others may see in a somewhat negative light. Were there any like that on your list? If so, please share if you are willing.

REFLECTION (in full group)
Please speak briefly about one or two things that surprised, touched, or interested you as you participated in this exercise.

3. Thinking about Strains Related to Age Difference

YOUR DESCRIPTION
Describe with a partner a situation in which you experienced strains related to age difference. Say where you were, who was there, what happened, what people said and did, whether anyone addressed the tension, and anything else necessary for your partner to understand the situation and its relationship to different ages and roles as students, parents, grandparents. Include, if possible... What you thought and felt. What you said to yourself. What you did then. What you said. What you considered doing or saying but chose not to.

LOOKING BACK
What social/cultural expectations supported your speaking out? What social/cultural expectations restrained your speaking out? What personal beliefs supported your speaking out? What personal beliefs restrained your speaking out?

LOOKING AHEAD
If you were in a similar situation tomorrow... What might you think and feel? What might you say to yourself? What might you say or do? Current social/cultural expectations that would support your speaking out. Current social/cultural expectations that would restrain your speaking out. Current personal beliefs that would support your speaking out. Current personal beliefs that would restrain your speaking out. What you wish others would say or do.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THEN AND NOW
What differences are there between the way you think, feel, believe, and might act now as compared with the time of the situation? How do you account for these developments? After giving your account, you may wish for the listener to indicate anything you said that was particularly illuminating, moving, or interesting.

4. The Uncertain Path to Dialogue: A Closed eye process

I invite you to join me in a self-reflection process. You can either just close your eyes and listen to me as I lead you through this self-reflection or, if that makes you uncomfortable, you can keep your eyes open and read along with me. The questions I am going to ask you to reflect upon are not requests for information; they are invitations to experience the sense of human connectedness and shared responsibility that comes from allowing ourselves to wonder, to not understand, to participate in the repersonalization of the generalized and objectified, to open up space for the future, now-being-realized world, the world that we create together. Perhaps, too, the questions are answers in themselves, pointing beyond themselves.

Think of the "I" voice as yourself as you listen or read along while you reflect.

Sometimes I am in a conversation, or an argument, or perhaps even a shouting match that goes nowhere, an encounter that produces nothing but heat. Sometimes I feel certain that I know exactly what someone else is about to say and I anticipate, with great conviction, just how wrong-headed it is going to be.

Sometimes I feel hopeless about ever being heard, understood, or adequately listened to by a particular person or in some particular conversation or on a particular subject. And sometimes I just get tired of trying to make myself understood. I don't want to try to explain myself again, or I feel dismissive, or perhaps violent. Sometimes I want to run right over what others say.

At times like these…
How can I keep from being taken over by hurt, hopelessness, anger, or disrespect?
How can I keep from being taken over by the belief that the other person - or group - is really the problem?
How can I keep myself from just shutting down?

But then, on the other hand…
What do I do that shuts others down?
What do I do that leaves others feeling insignificant, blank, out of place, silenced, and walled off, unwilling to be open when they are with me?
What do I do that prompts others to try to convince me of their rightness, of my wrongness, to will their assertions on me, to not speak directly to me - or to ignore my presence or even my very existence?

When I meet people who challenge my views, or my beliefs, or my values…
What makes it possible for me to listen to them?
What makes it possible for me to invite them to tell me more about what they think and feel?
What makes it possible for me to ask them how they came to think and feel as they do?

When I feel challenged, or even threatened by others…
What makes it possible to wonder about, to be interested in, to ask about, how they came to believe what they believe or to "know" what they know when it is so different from what I believe and from what I "know"?

What kinds of actions and contexts encourage me…
To speak with an open heart?
To listen with an open heart?

What kinds of contexts feel safe enough…
To enable me to speak so openly and listen so openly to others that I may be changed by the contact, influenced by the conversation?

What kinds of actions and contexts make it possible for me to shift the meanings I make of my experiences of past and present events and of imagined futures?
How can I open up to explore our many differences, our stories, our lives, and our present circumstances?
How can I speak fully even when speaking fully may reveal that we simply cannot understand one another? What kinds of actions and contexts encourage me?

To abandon assumptions that I know what others mean?
To turn my passion to inquiring about things I do not or cannot understand?
To reveal how much I do not understand?
To make space for differences in experience, in the meanings I give to that experience, and for every other kind of difference there may be?

What do I do....
That calls forth from others that which is unusual for them to speak openly?
That brings forward responses of unusual complexity and richness?
That calls forward other people's reflections, or their most passionate intentions?
Or their readiness to speak of fragmentary thoughts, thoughts that are only on their way to being fully thought, or those that have been thought but never before spoken?

When I have thought that others would find my thoughts, feelings, beliefs, or perspectives "wrong," off center," or just too different,

What have others done that has allowed me to be open with them, to think of and speak of things I have not spoken?
What have others done to call into voice that which I feared to say or perhaps even to think when I imagined, perhaps rightly, that open speaking might alienate the very people I cared about, or depended on? What have others done to call into voice my full feeling, thinking, and speaking in a way that has permitted me to welcome confusions, to feel less certain, and to open myself to change through my connection with them?

When I feel that other people's thoughts, feelings, beliefs, or perspectives are "wrong," "dangerous," or just too different from mine…
What might others do or say to prepare me to listen to that which feels intolerable to hear, too different, too confusing, too challenging, too incomprehensible, things I just don't want to hear?

How can I remind myself to speak for myself, from my own experience, and to not shore myself up by speaking as a member of a group, as if I represented others?
How can I remember to listen fully, openly, with genuine interest, without judgment and without argument, to another's challenging, or different, ideas, feelings, and beliefs?
How can I stay open to hearing fresh things even in other's familiar words?
And how can I listen just as fully, just as openly, and just as generously and without judgment to myself?
If I do hold myself open in this way, and if the "other," the one who is "different," does the same.

Might we then experience and speak of our similarities and refrain from defining ourselves strongly by our differences?
Might we refuse to define each other as "other?"

And if I hold myself open in this way with "like-minded" people…
Might we speak openly of our differences when we have previously defined ourselves by our similarities? Might we step away from seeing ourselves as an "us" that is distinct from the "them"?

How can we create a place where we can experience our connection with each other through our very differences…
A place where neither of us gives up central beliefs, values, and commitments, but where the tension of our difference can provide a kind of meeting, so that our conversation about difference can generate a fresh culture?
What does each of us each need to gain the vision, the will, the strength, and the simple doggedness to travel this path?
How shall we find the courage to make this journey?