What is this?

This is an activity to help students create community norms and intentions.  An educator could use this prior to having students engage in challenging conversations. These intentions will help students identify what they need to have productive dialogue, and allow the class to design tangible actions to help ensure the community upholds these student-sourced intentions.

For groups of students or colleagues to have generative conversations about difficult topics, we as teachers and facilitators must help build a strong set of intended ways of being and engaging with one another in order to create brave spaces.  These intentions are sometimes called “group norms,” “ground rules,” “expectations,” “agreements,” and probably many other names!  Too often groups talk about intentions at the beginning of a class or workshop, but never return to them.  

As our first design project in our class Designing (ourselves) for Racial Justice, we invited our students to co-create a set of prototypes to help keep our intentions active and present throughout the course. The Intention Prototypes available on the right side of this page were designed for our class, by our class. We came back to these every session. We believe they are powerful and can be used elsewhere, and that other groups of students can create their own intentions and prototypes as well.

How to Use These Resources:

There are links to three downloadable resources a little higher up on the right side of this page.  Here are descriptions of each with a bit about how to use them (they have further instructions once you open them).

1) Designing Our Intentions - discussion and ideas

This Google Presentation template can be copied and used to facilitate a group of students or workshop participants through discussing and coming up with ideas for norms and intentions.

2) Designing Our Intentions - prototype and share

After the group has created ideas for norms and intentions, you can use this whiteboard template to guide the participants to further develop their ideas and share their prototypes. If you use a digital workspace like Mural or Miro, you can make this template a background. You could also recreate it physically (on a whiteboard or paper) or print it large enough to work on it directly.

3) Intention Prototypes

This Google Presentation can be shared as a real world example of what can emerge through this design activity.  The intention prototypes in this deck can also be borrowed and used directly by other groups.