A City, Country, Region
Develop and promote a cross-pluralistic vision; observe, learn to focus, listen and respect.Learn to recognize objects that represent a city, region or country and its culture.
Introduce the exercise and its goals to put the participants at ease.Participants must think about a symbol of their own culture using an object of their choice. What comes first to their mind when they think about their culture?Participants introduce their objects to help others to recognize their city, region or country without naming it and the group should try to find it out.
After everybody has introduced their objects, facilitator can launch the debriefing.What objects caught your interest and attention? Why?What object did you choose to symbolize your region? Why?What knowledge did you gain during this exchange of objects? Where there similarities between objects?Would you present any objects differently after this session? why?
Exercise to be implemented, preferably, with participants from different cultural backgrounds.Make sure participants avoid mockery of the objects being presented by others. The idea is to recognize and respect the origin of each participant, and as far as possible avoid falling in stereotypes and easyfication of the other.
In order to deconstruct stereotypes it would be important to return to the results of this exercise later on the educational process.A possible exercise to follow this one is “Who are I?” in this manual. Once learners have already worked with identity, stereotype, prejudice... concepts, come back to the objects they chose and analyse how much themselves used stereotypes to identify their place of origin.