MOSAIC - The training kit for Euro-Mediterranean youth work

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The selection of the photograph is important and you should try to choose one
that shows some kind of action or activity, rather than a static portrait-type
picture, in a culture as distant as possible from most of the participants in your
group. If you have background information about the picture, this can be useful
in the debriefing, and you should use it to discuss the original interpretation by
the group.
The activity can be very amusing, particularly when information is badly
distorted from one person to the next. You may need to remind participants at
the beginning that the task is difficult and that they should not do anything
that might be likely to make the volunteers feel uncomfortable or that they are
failing in their task.
Remind volunteers and participants that questions of any kind are not permitted! The
information should be transmitted and received by the volunteers without their having
the chance to check facts or ask clarifying questions. The pass-it-on part of the activity
should not take longer than about 10 minutes.
Variations
The activity also works well with a written text, though here the interpretation aspect
is less striking than with images. If you use a text, it should not be more than about
half a page of A4 and should describe an event, in the same way that the photograph
should.
If you have an artistic volunteer, you can ask him/ her to draw the photograph on a
flipchart at the end! In this way the visual image is transformed back to a visual image
at the end of the process.
Ideas for action
Ask participants to look at various newspapers or websites and consider how images of
certain groups are used to send a particular message. For example, they might investigate
images of Africans, or Muslims, or refugees or young people. Encourage the group to
research and put together a collection of images that represent a different picture from
that put out by the media. They could send some of these images to local media outlets
or post them on a website of their own.
Suggestions for follow-up
The activity “Young and beautiful”, in the online version of Compass, looks at society’s
images of young people and encourages them to think about the way they would like
to be seen by others.
If you want to follow up the media theme, you could try the Compass activity “Front
page”, where participants work to put together the front page of an imaginary newspaper.
Further information
The activity is adapted from The world through children’s eyes, published by Amnesty International,
in Russian. It can be found at http://amnesty.org.ru/pages/mgd-index-rus.
MOSAIC - The training kit for Euro-Mediterranean youth work