Peer-to-Peer Activity: Storytelling
Overview
Participants summarize relevant personal experiences pertaining to this commitment and how they handled those experiences.
Competencies
- Participants identify positive ways to counter discrimination and stay vigilant within their own sphere of influence.
- Participants articulate their lived experiences through verbal storytelling.
INTRODUCTION
As a facilitator, you could show the video found below which features a meeting of ten Serbs and ten Croats in Brussels during Holy Week in 2017. The video is a good depiction of groups coming together to develop empathy and understanding for one another. This video provides a good starting demonstration of how people from different backgrounds can learn from one another through the telling of lived experiences.
Alternatively, you could demonstrate storytelling by providing a story that illustrates issues surrounding Commitment from a local context.
Note: If time is short, you may want to omit the video and proceed with participant stories.
DISCUSSION
To stimulate discussion, the facilitator can ask the following questions:
- In particular, has there been a situation where participants had to intervene in defence of a person belonging to a minority?
- What type of discriminatory practices are more likely to occur in the participants’ environment?
- What types of minorities are there in the country where participants live? Who are the different actors in their respective areas and how can they better ensure respect for the rights of minorities?
- Participants may also provide examples of the positive or negative role played by the media in this respect.
CONCLUSION
- Encourage participants to write their thoughts about this activity and to share these stories with friends and family members in order to spread awareness.
- Has there been a situation where participants had to intervene in defence of a person belonging to a minority?
- What type of discriminatory practices are more likely to occur in the participants’ environment?
- What types of minorities are there in the country where participants live? Who are the different actors in their respective areas and how can they better ensure respect for the rights of minorities?
- Participants may also provide examples of the positive or negative role played by the media in this respect.
Standing Up for Minority Rights A video depicting young Serbs and Croats meeting together during the Holy Week 2017 in Brussels. This porject by the Conference of European Chruches was undertaken in partnership with the Quaker Council for European Affairs and the Church’s Commission for Migrants in Europe.
- The #Faith4Rights modules are flexible and require adaptation by the facilitators before their use. Case studies related to peer-to-peer exercises in the 18 modules need to be selected by the facilitators from within the environment where the learning takes place. The #Faith4Rights toolkit is a prototype methodology that requires contextualization, based on the text of the 18 commitments, context and additional supporting documents.
- Not all issues raised need to be resolved. This would be an impossible and even a counterproductive target. The aim is rather to enhance critical thinking and communication skills, admitting that some questions could receive many answers, depending on numerous factors.
- Tensions may occur during discussions related to “faith” and “rights”. Most of these tensions are due to human interpretations. Learning sessions are spaces for constructive dialogue in a dynamic process where tensions can be reduced with the help of clear methodologies, including pre-emptive situation analysis and evidence of positive results in areas of intersectionality between faith and rights.
- When preparing the sessions, facilitators need to factor in the profile, age and backgrounds of participants. Focused attention on the learning objectives can transform tensions into constructive exploration of new ideas.
- Meaningful engagement requires democratically pre-established rules. Facilitators should dedicate time with participants to elaborate these rules together at the outset and acting all along the training as their custodians.
- The time frames suggested in this #Faith4Rights toolkit are merely indicative. Facilitators may adapt them freely to suit the needs of their group of participants. The key balance is between respecting the overall timeframe while not cutting short a positive exchange momentum.
- To ensure optimal and sustainable benefit, facilitators may create a “training notebook” for participants during their peer-to-peer learning sessions. It would contain a compilation of templates to help participants keep track of what they have learned throughout the programme and eventually use this notebook as their personalised follow-up tool.
- When technically feasible, facilitators are also advised to project the module under discussion on screen in order to alternate between discussions thereon and showing the audio-visual materials listed in each module or any other items selected by the facilitator themselves.
- “Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder. Help someone’s soul heal. Walk out of your house like a shepherd.” (Rumi)
- “Your true character ismost accurately measured by how you treat those who can do ‘Nothin’for you.” (Mother Theresa)