Week 2: We see ourselves as ... (Community & Connection, Part 2 continued)

So ... in the class, after we'd filled in our CONNECTION sheets, I asked everyone to come to the front table and mark a numbered chart with a blob of bingo marker where they'd marked a checkmark on their handouts. Here was the result:

There are some interesting (and possibly predictable results). It's probably no surprise that #15 "I love the arts" was so widely shared, or #26 "Community is important to me". To some extent, since we are self-selecting to be in the class, we are bound to have some things in common. If we look at the other high-numbered responses, other interesting things pop up. For instance, a large number us own a home, have siblings, grew up in Canada, have English as our mother tongue and finished high school and college or university.

But we are by no means a homogenous group. Some of the answers with fewer blobs are interesting, too. Only one person worked in trades, only one person is a primary caregiver for someone else, and only one person marked that they like sports. But the odds are very high that they share enough identifiers with everyone else in the group that these singular attributes make them an interesting addition to our discussions rather than outsiders.

And there are even a few attributes that no one identified with. #18 and #19 shows us that cats and dogs are the norm in the group, and everyone likes animals. #27, predictably, is blank since we've already seen above that community is important. And everyone has at least finished high school. I'm sure there are times and places where that might not have been so.

If you weren't able to attend the class, why don't you print out the above chart and add your own blobs. See where you overlap and where you are unique.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, this exercise is loosely based on the Unity Project, a project headed by Nancy Belmont, who wanted to start a discussion in her community in response to the growing negativity in US politics. I modified their materials (with permission), and would also like to thank Devien Roy for her assistance in both expanding the range of questions and reframing them to be less "American" (fewer questions about gun control, for instance).