Last weekend, we led a leadership retreat with the group of new scholarship recipients in the nearby municipality of Salamá. We started talking about the 5 guiding values for the program: responsibility, commitment, respect/dignity, solidarity, and honesty, and the students came up with a list of recommendations to follow for the weekend. Above all the students made the commitment to work together as a team and to help one another understand the material.
We led the introduction with an activity called “the spider web” with the intention of demonstrating to the students how important it is to work together because if one person lets go of their thread, the entire web falls apart. As they threw the ball of yarn to create the web, each student stated what they wanted to learn during the retreat.
After the warm-up activities, we went straight into the main topic; leadership. We began by watching a documentary, Sipakapa No Se Vende, about a Guatemalan community trying to get a Canadian mining company to leave their land. We paused the movie right before the end and divided the class into three groups, each would dramatize an original ending to the movie. The catch: each group was assigned a particular type of leadership style that they had to enact through the skit (autocratic, passive, and participatory leaders). In the end, the students unanimously decided that the only way for a community to achieve its objectives would be through participatory leadership.
After lunch, we shifted topics from leadership to a growing field in education called “critical media analysis.” The aim of critical media analysis is to provide students with tools so that they can become active producers and critics of media, rather than consumers who take media messages at face value. Ultimately, students will make videos in which they represent their own community and culture to an audience of youth in other parts of Guatemala and the world. But to start, we wanted to help students learn to see that media images are not objective portrayals of reality, but rather subjective representations of reality that are designed in very intentional ways to create a particular impression in the mind of the viewer. We started out by providing two groups with completely different images of Arnold Schwarzenegger (one as the terminator, another as the governor). Obviously, the lists of adjectives describing the two Arnolds were quite different, and we challenged students to think of strategies that media-makers are able to use to portray such radically different views of the same person.
We then flipped the script by giving each student adjectives such as “powerful”, “weak”, “rich”, or “poor” that they had to represent in a picture of themselves.
Students learned to see that there are multiple ways of presenting the same reality, or the same person. None is “right”; all are constructions.
Critical media analysis is a topic that we carried over to Sunday as well when we learned how media uses the tools of representations to sell products. After watching several example ads, students developed their own highly creative commercials to sell a fairly unexciting consumer product: a water bottle! (Check out the students’ highly creative advertisement HERE. Its in Spanish, but the plot is not hard to follow!)
The students were given some free time before dinner where they played soccer, braided each other’s hair, listened to music, danced, and had some great conversations. After dinner, we were each given a candle that was not yet lit as we sat in a circle. The way one would light their candle was to get the flame passed to them by another person. Macario (one of the VyM Program Leaders) started the chain by saying some appreciative words to Michael and the chain kept going until everyone had a lit candle that was used for a bonfire. This activity was used to raise awareness about each individual’s capabilities. The biggest impact was being able to recognize one’s own weaknesses while also realizing that they are able to strengthen them. Another impactful moment was hearing each other’s life experiences, not only because we learned more about each other but also to show support within the group.
The students left the retreat as a team, more connected than ever!
One Response
I found the description of the leadership retreat very powerful but I have some concern about the message that the media never presents objective reality. I think it is important to analyze media information for biases, commercial nature, etc. But to say that the media is always subjective is to overstate the premise.