Becky and Britt 11/7 Workshop

Our workshop this week focused on interviewing. Beforehand, I typed up a list of questions ranging from "What is success to you?", "When have you felt the happiest?" and "What historical figure do you most identify with?" etc. (I can email you this list if you'd like.) We paired up the women randomly to interview one another based on these or their own questions, except for two women who really wanted to be together and explained that otherwise they wouldn't get anything out of the activity. We also explained that the goal was three tiered: One--to interview and find out about the person, and follow tangential conversations to get more out of it. Two--to be interviewed and share with the interviewer. Three--to write about the person you interviewed by answering the prompt "To me, s0-and-so is..." One thing I should have made clearer was that the writing assignment was meant to express their views of the person in their OWN words, not just a tally of the facts about the person. We gave the groups about a half an hour, and we told them when the half-way point was to switch. Then we spent about 10-15 minutes writing, which wasn't enough for some people, while others had finished early. Then we shared what we wrote. The women who wrote laundry lists about their interviewee presented entirely differently than those who put their own thoughts and words into their writing, and the result was that the laundry-list writers wanted to improve and bring it back next week. We got mostly positive reactions to the workshop.