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Asking Yourself New Questions
Brief Description: For the past several months, you have been hard at work at your placement site and striving for some type of rhythm in your community living Activity:
Group activity: Sharing what puzzles you, seeking new insights
Plan a time that works best for all of your community members to participate in this activity. Be sure to let the participants know that they should come to the activity with examples of questions that have been puzzling them. Allow an hour for discussion.
Directions: Gather your volunteer community in a comfortable space that lends itself well to discussion. Choose someone to facilitate the discussion.
The Facilitator may use the following for discussion.
1. What are some questions that you’ve been dealing with concerning your volunteer community life or your work placement site? List all the questions your group raises.
2. Ask the group to prioritize which questions they want to tackle and in what order.
(Some examples could be practical matters or might include tougher issues.)
3. Begin with the question which has the greatest interest. Ask the person who first raised it to briefly summarize his or her question and what he or she finds puzzling or interesting about it.
4. Invite others to contribute any insights they have which clarify the question and then give each person a chance to share their response to the question.
5. When the wisdom of the group is exhausted, decide if any follow-up research is needed, who will do it and when and how it will be reported back to the group.
6. Then proceed to the next most interesting question and repeat the process.
If this activity works well for your group, consider the possibility of moving to broader areas of the puzzling aspects of:
- life in your neighborhood, society or in the Church,
- policy issues, poverty and access to health care,
- communication and relationships related to community living, etc.
Remember, the goal is not to settle for a predictable answer and thereby stop the process of thinking, but to continue to ask deeper questions and gain broader understandings.