Leadership Workshop Report 2019
Engaging constructively with school children has been one of the core focuses of Empowering the Vision Project’s (ENVISION) mission. In pursuit of this mission, ENVISION conducts workshops, outreach programmes and provides career guidance to school children.
The fifth Leadership Workshop for class XII students of STS Paonta and TCV Selaqui was held at the Industrial Training Institute (ITI) Selaqui, formerly known as SOS Vocational Training Centre for Tibetans, on 06-07 April 2019. Contrary to the conventional definition of Leadership, ENVISION attempts to instill inner values of leadership by building assertiveness, developing critical thinking skills and understanding self through explorative and interactive approaches.
The two-day workshop was preceded by a welcome dinner and an orientation evening attended by 99 students including 28 from Paonta Sambhota School and 10 students from ITI. ITI students made a special request to be a part of this workshop. From the orientation evening, participants signed up according to their interest under the three workshop themes: Creative Writing, Art and Theatre. Each group had over 30 participating students.
Day-I: Workshop Session on Building Assertiveness and Critical Thinking
Tenzin Tsundue (Writer, Poet, & Activist), Karma Sichoe, (Thangka Painter & Contemporary Artist), and Jaya Iyer (Theatre Artist) led a day-long workshop on the theme ‘Building Assertiveness and Critical Thinking.’ During the opening plenary session, they introduced themselves, shared their experiences and charted out briefly their plans for the day.
Tenzin Tsundue, shared his gradual development of passion for writing poems and activism, his innate love for story-telling and making people listen and laugh at his randomly created stories; and emphasized on the need to think beyond classroom teachings. Tsundue explained three stages of creative writing- observation, change of perspectives and articulation. Students were assigned creative writing activities thereafter.
Jaya Iyer engaged students through various plays, activities and interaction on assertiveness and critical thinking drawing analogies from conventional fairy tales such as Cinderella’s glass-sandal narration and its critique both from a feministic and story-telling perspective. Also, other themes primarily pertaining to assertiveness and critical thinking situations were given and assigned to enact, practice and perform within and between groups to encourage maximum participation of students.
Karma Sichoe, a Tibetan Thangka Painter and Contemporary Artist enlightened participants on unconventional ways of understanding self through imaginative and artistic activities. Assertiveness and Critical thinking, he said: “can best be achieved through expressions in the form of art.” He explained tools and essentialities of drawing art such as imagination, observation and formation of subjects. With his guidance, students were made to illustrate in drawings objects attracting their mental faculty at the time on paper using simple drawing tools such as colour pencils, watercolours, and graphite.
The highlight of the day’s workshop was the concluding plenary session wherein participating students from each of the three groups presented their learnings from the sessions. Students from theatre group performed skits while creative writing and art group students shared their writings and artwork respectively with explanations.
Day II: Self-Exploration, Goal-setting, and ‘Let us make a Difference’
ENVISION Team conducted the entire second day of the workshop. The morning session focused on reflecting and understanding our true selves and values followed by a presentation and an exercise on finding our personality types based on John Holland’s theory. The second half of the morning was more hands-on with ENVISION staff taking students through college admission procedures and guidelines including scholarship opportunities.
The last session entitled Let’s Make a Difference aims to motivate students to commit to a goal of improving themselves and situations around them. The emphasis was on ensuring that the goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound). Various daily commitments from reading more books, keeping journals, practicing meditation and yoga to recycling wastes, avoiding junk food and improving language and communication skills, were shared by the students during the session.