Activity: What does empowerment look like in your culture? (Disc/Sim)
Time required: 1 hour
Learning objectives: To be able to identify the appearance, talk and behavior of someone who is empowered versus someone who is passive or aggressive. Empowerment may vary slightly from culture to culture in the way it looks like.
Materials: Flip charts, marker pens
Method:
- The trainer explains the following: “When looking at someone, the way they carry themselves, the way they walk, talk and behave towards others, we can have an idea of whether they are empowered or not. It is important to help people understand and identify what empowerment looks like in others so that they may learn how to develop it in themselves”. Empowerment is not aggressive (demanding, loud, wanting its own way only) and it is not passive (afraid, quiet, unmoving). This activity will give you a chance to identify what empowerment LOOKS LIKE in your culture”.
- Participants are divided in 4 groups. Each group will be asked to draw a person who is empowered and what they look like on a flip chart or poster paper. They can think of the following things for their drawing:
i-When someone is empowered what does their face, hands, body language look like?
ii-When someone is empowered what does their voice, words, talking style look like?
iii-When someone is empowered what do their actions look like, how do they behave?
- After the drawing is done, each group presents the drawing. Right after that, one person from each group has to walk into the room and act as an empowered person with a disability who is approaching a shopkeeper in the community to see if there is a way their shop could be made accessible.
- Afterwards, the group discusses what they perceived as the most important things that determines someone’s empowerment from the outside, and the trainer summarizes.
Shirin Kiani and Annie Lafrenière (Technical Resources Division)Page 1