My Two-Day Workshop

My group decided to use our two-day workshop to address two aspects of identity that we collectively felt were objectively important and interesting to explore with our group of attendees, race and gender/sexuality. We felt that the workshop should be open to anyone who wishes to attend, but we will be advertising it on college campuses to students as well as faculty. The topic seems daunting at first glance; the idea that attending this workshop would mean understanding all aspects of race and gender/sexuality is intimidating, so we kept this in mind when designing our workshop.
In order to make this workshop marketable to anyone we designed it with some key factors in mind. We envisioned a comprehensive yet approachable workshop that anyone …show more content…
We wanted to separate our workshop into clear and manageable pieces in order to easily separate tasks among our group members as well as to create an approachable quality to the workshop itself. We decided to start each day with an interactive participatory activity to get the ideas flowing amongst the workshop’s participants. Our first activity that I was in charge of designing was an activity that I did in one of my courses this semester. The activity is titled “Privilege Walk.” The purpose of this activity is to introduce our guests to the ideas of racial and gender inequality that exists within their group. Because our main focuses for this workshop are race, gender, and sexuality, I tailored the questions for the activity to reflect those aspects of identity. This activity is meant to highlight the differences and similarities between a group of individuals, some of which are not physically evident such as sexuality, religion, and personal opinions. Next, there would be a guest speaker, who we have casted for the time being to be Moustafa Bayoumi, who is the author of one of our readings How Does it Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America. We created some talking points for him to include in his lecture that would introduce our workshop guests to the concept of race. Later that day, we would begin the afternoon session by engaging in an open forum style discussion. We hope that our attendees will participate, discuss, and possibly even disagree about the many complexities about race in America. We created some prompting questions to facilitate discussion if there are lulls in the dialogue. For the first night, we decided to have a film showing of a film that we thought might be interesting and educational without it being a documentary. I searched through some lists online and through Netflix for a film that focused on racial topics, but wasn’t a traditionally