The reflection questions seem a bit posed toward the Inequalities Project that we didn’t get around to, but just reflecting on the facilitation experience itself, it was good to work with my peers on the week’s topic in particular. I think creating an experience that could help bring the idea of denial of privilege personally home, in the form of the walk-around-the-room-and-note activity was particularly powerful, and I thought the discussion we had was thoughtful.
I was initially concerned about the possible minefield of getting class participation, but fortunately some of the reliably talkative members of our group got discussion off to interesting places without too much effort. It’s really great in a group to know that something isn’t going to be left out to die—it might not go the direction you expect, but no point is going to die in awkward silence. Our subdivisions of the reading were a little arbitrary, but in the end, I felt we were able to bring it together to some pretty decent ends.
There were some visible interactions with social identities represented in the room with regard to the readings discussion; some seemed more comfortable expressing their experiences than others on subjects where doing so could’ve been considered thorny. Personally, it was enlightening to observe the dynamics, and I thought we kept things on a good path while also not allowing anything particularly haphazard to start flying around. It was a bit weird trying to get so much from a single text source, but on the whole, I felt it was a successful endeavor.
