Week10Activity

Week 10 Activity: Developing a Vision for Life


Background:

Consider what might happen in a workshop designed to "support young people to design their own lives".

Imagine that the primary goal of this workshop is to help the participants to develop a "clear life vision" -- a strong idea of what life looks like/feels like at a particular future point (for our purposes here, you might focus on a single point where the person is established in a career or a personal situation that brings out the best in them). As a result of the workshop, the participants will be able to visualize their lives at that point.

Imagine also that the workshop connects past to future: the participants need to their lives up to now as a story, where each "chapter" represents a major move that is already leading toward that vision. In other words, help young people see that the previous "chapters" of their lives are not to be perceived as a collection of obstacles, but instead, they were, in fact, "what needed to happen" in order to prepare them for the future life that they visualize for themselves.

Instructions:

Now, develop a high-level outline for what might happen during the workshop to help lead the participants to end up with this strong, clear visualization of their lives. Identify the kinds of workshop activities (including homework) that would achieve the goal for each participant. Remember scaffolding! - this means that you might not simply be able to instruct the participants to "go write your vision statement" or "draw a map of your ideal life". Consider how to lay out the steps over the course of the workshop so that the participants have actually done the thinking needed to build toward the high level of clarity needed by the end. In your group, make sure to establish first what you mean by "young people" - age of intended audience, or type of community. If there are other issues about the context that need to be clarified, simply make the decision and move forward with that context in mind.

Additional requirement: assume that the use of literature/arts/storytelling will serve some key role within the workshop (although you can also allow that some of the workshop activities work at a more general level without an obvious connection to these areas).

Use these online documents to record your group's work: Group 1 | Group 2 | Group 3 | Group 4
Group 1 = Alex, Casey, Kyle
Group 2 = Laura, Lauren, Andrew
Group 3 = Andrea, Julia, Bill
Group 4 = Tri, Matt, Russell

These reflect the template worksheet below and leaves space for four 90-minute meetings, spaced one week apart (this kind of timing, for example, could fit into a young person's life as an out-of-school-time program, a summer weekend program, a college extracurricular activity, or within various other organized environments that are already set up to support young people). Modify this if a different timing/schedule seems to fit better with your ideas. Start with a high-level ideas for what happens across the overall workshop, and then return to the individual weekly activities and develop more detail as time allows, and be prepared to present a brief summary to the class when returning from the small group.

Other possible questions to consider:


Week 1: 90 minutes

Week 2: 90 minutes

Week 3: 90 minutes

Week 4: 90 minutes