It Was All A Simple Wooden Puzzle

If the world only had one seed,

To grow in every corner, every meadow, and every field

We would not have tulips nor trees,

Life would cease to exist.

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For the last couple of months, I have been part of a 20-hour placement as part of my EDS 220 course. I finally understand the importance of diversity in education. I am going to share my experiences in this blog to give you a short glimpse of the things I have discovered.

It all began when I was sitting a short grey spinning chair in my EDS 220 course, it was the third week and being a procrastinator myself I still hadn’t chosen my field placement. During our break, one of my classmates, Rabia, grabbed the microphone and announced an opportunity on campus that can help some of us complete our placements.

An English conversation circle… She told us the date and time, displayed the poster below and asked us to come talk to her if we were interested.

I had never heard about this and literally had no idea what it was. So, I took this as an opportunity, I went up to Rabia at the end of class and told her to sign me up. I wanted to try something new and that’s how it all began.

As part of this position I was required to do 6 hours of “FSG training”, Facilitated study group training over the reading week. I was dreading having to do this training especially since I couldn’t wait until I got a break off of school. The idea of going to campus on a Saturday didn’t sound very exciting. However, I decided to stick with it to the end. The training was split into three modules discussing different topics about leadership and facilitation.

When I walked in, I was handed a wooden structure with a hoop and told to remove the ring with no force.

I was struggling along with everyone around me. I tried everything but nothing worked. 15 minutes later, as I was about to give up. Angela in the row in front of me yelled, "I got it!" NO WAY. She had taken out the ring. Tulip, the girl leading the training asked her to facilitate to the rest of us without giving us the answer or showing us but instead only by asking us questions. We learned that this is what facilitation is all about. The point of leading the language conversation circles wasn’t simply to tell people to do certain tasks. It was more about facilitating a safe and fun environment for people from different backgrounds, languages, and cultures to come together and teach one another. I was very curious to see how these conversation circles would engage people. We also received training on how to create “lesson plans” to get everyone there involved (one of the ones we made can be seen below). It was a very fun training and by the end, I was glad I stuck through it until the end.

As part of these conversation circles, I had to help out with creating lesson plans, leading the conversation circles, and marketing to get more people to participate.

One of the conversations circles we had was about cross-culture communication and I was so happy to see such a huge turn-out. At first, everyone was shy, and people weren’t participating but I noticed as we delved further into the session everyone began opening up, sharing and laughing. One of the activities we had planned was for students to learn a new language or dialect. Everyone was placed in pairs and they taught each other two phrases in various languages. In the end, everyone shared what they learned to the bigger group. Below are some videos of phrases that people learned through this activity.

Throughout this experience, there were some challenges we faced, some wooden puzzles that we had to solve. One of them was getting people to open up and share. A lot of the times the facilitators were doing most of the talking; however, we didn’t want that. That’s why we decided to allow students to showcase what they learned and share with the entire group. I noticed that this got everyone talking and laughing which is exactly what we wanted. Another challenge we are currently dealing with is that with this COVID- 19 situation we have to find alternate ways to deliver this laid- back and fun environment for people to converse. We are currently looking into different ways we can continue to lead these sessions virtually in order to keep people engaged during this difficult time.

I have realized that the best learning environments are those that allow people who come from different cultures and backgrounds to share their ideas and thoughts. A classroom shouldn’t always be led by one person because a single individual’s view can be very limited. There will always be challenging wooden puzzles that come our way, that is why we need to use our diversity and find a solution through our differences.