An(other) afternoon with the Shads

‹ wilu 2010 — Presentation skills, take 2 ›

08.Jul.2010 An(other) afternoon with the Shads

This year, I spent another afternoon with the MacShads (Shad Valley students @ McMaster) along with my co-facilitator, Susan. We wanted to take an opportunity to do some non-library, non-information literacy instruction, free from all fetters of normal expectations. So, what we came up with was to riff off of the MacShad’s overall theme project topic: Canada’s aging population.

To this end, we looked for interesting multimedia that dealt with the topic, and built part of the session around that. The videos we sourced were about depopulation, filial piety, ageism and ‘curing’ aging. These topics were all very good for sparking interesting lines of questioning and follow-up discussion. Part two of the three-hour session was originally to be a design exercise in creating an ‘age-friendly city’. This was scrapped, because it tread too close to the design challenge the students were working on. Instead, we tried our hand at leading a debate. There were two topics (and four teams, one for each side of each topic). We made clear rules and guidelines for the debate, which propelled it along nicely. Also, I was happy to get a chance to use the Thode Library ThInK Space as it was designed for, as an active learning classroom.

I think that the workshop was fairly successful. The Shads always impress with their knuckle-down work ethic, and there was some good laughs, too.

[Small update: The report that the Shad co-director got from the student leaders was that the students were sleepy during the videos, but better during the discussion. Not exactly the glowing praise we were going for!]