Improve accessibility ahead of your event.
Make it more inviting (#mimi) is all about accessibility and relevance for your learners. Can they access your activities? Will they find relevance in them? How are learners represented in your shared work? Can they see themselves reflected in the agenda and materials you’ve assembled?
There are several ways to practice #mimi while you iterate and prepare for your event. Here are a few of the things you can do to improve your prototypes before an event:
- Write for your audience, not for yourself. How do your activities “feel” and “sound?” Are they friendly for “first-time users?” Is your language as clear and simple as it can be? Have you illustrated your ideas with examples that make sense to your audience?
- Audit your activities and materials for differently abled learners. Have you thought through different ways of inviting participation in physical activities? Have you used contrasting colors in your online resources for maximum readability and visibility? Have you added alt text tags to online images for people using screen readers? Are there multiple, engaging ways for people to learn a new concept or skill if they opt out of one activity or another? Do you alternatives invite more participatory learning than “watch and listen?”
- Choose your examples and illustrations mindfully. Can audience members see themselves reflected positively in your materials? Will they feel supported, trusted, and competent when they look at the work you’ve prepared? Have you used your pre-survey results and personas to help you choose inviting examples, explanations, images, and sounds for your handouts, slide decks, and webpages?
- Strive for authenticity. Can you poll critical friends and potential audience members for their first responses to your work? What would they suggest you add to make it more inviting for attendees at your event? How can you remain authentic as a facilitator without being patronizing and use others’ input to frame learning that feels relevant to your audience, as well?
- Communicate often. Can you schedule routine check-ins with event organizers to get their feedback on your plans? Can you establish a regular cadence or routine for sharing any changes you make to improve the accessibility and relevance of your activities? What key questions do you need to ask stakeholders again and again to #mimi?
The big idea is to make your work make sense for your learners. If they feel like there’s a barrier between themselves and the work - or between themselves and you - they’ll rightly resist you and the work. Making the work inviting is a way to serve your learners and establish trust from the start of your time together.
Another way to invite participation as a facilitator is to design for choice. When you offer attendees multiple, manageable pathways to learn a new concept or skill, you help them feel involved in their own learning. That feeling of ownership is much more motivating than being told what to do - or being told to do the same thing as everyone else at the same speed with the same results.
A simple way to design for choice is to offer online and offline versions of the same activity. This makes sense if you know some audience members are worried about technology, but very much want to learn what you have to teach. For example, you don’t have to be on a computer to think algorithmically or practice logic or computational thinking, though you can be.
You can also create multiple templates or versions of the same activity that speak to different affinities or fandoms held by your learners.
You can invite some learners to remix an existing project or to work from a template while others create an original work from scratch.
You don’t need to plan a thousand different ways to do every activity you have planned; however, you should build on your prototypes before an event and try to suggest and plan for 2-3 different ways to accomplish each task. You want your learners to feel like they’re making decisions and owning their work as they travel the roadmap of the event. They should feel like they are taking a journey instead of following you on yours.
Another way to do this is to offer a lot of choices about content within a single, simple activity you invite everyone to do. For example, you might ask learners to create a Top 10 list or playlist or recipe. Being able to choose the content that goes inside the container of an activity you designed is another way to build choice into your class, session, or workshop and practice #mimi.
Agency means having control over yourself. It’s the feeling you get when you’re making your own, informed decisions about what to do next. It’s the freedom to ask questions and find answers. It’s the freedom to fail and try again.
You want your learners to feel like they have agency throughout the time you spend together. Part of building up that feeling of agency is offering choice. Another part of building agency is protecting time and space for inquiry and play.
Make sure that at least some of your activities have some “free time” built into them during which learners can explore and learn on their own or from peers. Give them time to ask, “What if I do this?”, and, “How did you do that?” The opportunity to pursue their own lines of thought without undue facilitation from you - and the opportunity to coach other learners - will help them feel like they own what they’re doing individually and collectively.
Get out of the way.
Be ready to help your learners lead themselves and each other for part of the day.
Pick one of your prototypes. Take a look at it from a #mimi perspective and
- Ask for help from a critical friend, event organizer, or potential audience member to make it more inviting.
- Make sure any physical activities have engaging, participatory alternatives at a different level of physical activity.
- Review and revise your examples, explanations, images, and sounds to make sure they accurately and positively reflect your audience members’ experiences.
- Audit any online components for accessibility issues using a service like WAVE.
- Be true to yourself as a facilitator invested in serving your learners. Revise your activities to speak to your learners’ affinities, background knowledge, and expectations.
- Review any changes you make with your readers from step 1.
If you have time before your event, work through several prototypes using the same #mimi steps.
As a complement to your #mimi work, go back to that same prototype and plan for 2-3 different ways to engage with its main activity. You might make an online activity and an offline one. You might curate 3-5 videos and ask each audience member to watch 1 and summarize it for the others’ at their table. You might have a beginner, intermediate, and advanced activity on the same topic (such as writing a program or script).
Revise your prototype to include these options and prepare any materials your learners will need to do them.