Exercise shared experience
From WRIWiki
Contents |
Name: Shared Experience
Time:
Goal or purpose of the exercise:
To help build group cohesion
How it's done
Shared experiences is a general term for experiences, most of them essentially nonverbal, which help develop group cohesion. Dancing, singing, meditation, playing and working together, eating together and sports, are all possible shared experiences through which participants come to know one another in ways which tend to develop the trust which is essential in critical action situations. Happily, shared experiences also have the advantage of reducing tension built up as the result of external forces. Manual work, such as chopping wood, or taking part in weekend work camps in ghetto areas or on a farm, links shared experiences to the idea of constructive programme and mitigates any existing fixation on protest alone.
Trainers notes
The major limitation of shared experiences is that participants may become so enamoured of these activities, or so willingly deflected from the more demanding aspects of training, that they never get on to the real work of social change. Shared experiences are meant, in the context of training, to be a means and not an end.
