This practice was applied during the Mingling Activities after it became salient that spoken communication among Locals and TCN’s would be a barrier in successful bringing closer the two groups. Thsu in order to show from the beginning that if someone is will enough and prepared to interact and have fun can overcome the spoken communication barrier; we introduced icebreaking activities that do not require to speak with each other.
When all the participants were gathered in the mingling meeting point, a “silent” icebreaking activity would initiate the meeting. Of course silent when it comes to spoken words, not laughter and noise caused by the activity.
The icebreaking activities that were selected to be used were:
Lining up during which group of people are told that they will have some minutes to line up in a particular order without speaking. They will then be told to line up according to a certain criteria such as shoe size, alphabetically by first name, by age, month of birthday etc. This can be repeated quite a few times until the team members know enough for each other.
Charades: The facilitator divides people into couples, one TCN with one local, and give them a set of questions instructing them to instead tell the answer to the couple to at each answer out.
Everyone enjoyed it and seemed to quickly realise that they can use other ways to communicate beside speaking a common language.
Aim of the best practice:
To promote non verbal communication as an alternative since the chance of communicating in a common language was limited.
Objectives of the best practice:
To bring people together and make them feel comfortable with each other
To make both locals and TCNs realise that once there is “a will a way”.
Min: 4
Max:20
Min: 4
Max:20
It depends of the icebreaking activity that will be chosen, how bi the group is and how many times you would like to repeat an activity like lining up or how many questions will be given for charades.
For example for each line up activity with a group of 10 people we would suggest five minutes to be given. The suggested number of questions are 5-6.
For charades, the proposal is a couple of minutes per question per person with 5-6 questions minimum.
Overall, for a 10 person group an activity like this would be suggested to take place for at least 30-40 minutes in order for everyone to feel comfortable and express themselves accordingly.
Facilitators/trainers
Pen, paper, room (or a nice day outside)
It overcomes the verbal communication problem and it is fun for everyone.
It is very easy to implement and participants have a lot of fun.
It might take more time than expected and the facilitators need to be alert in order to make sure that everything is working as it should. Especially for coupling activities it is suggested that more than one facilitators are present.
In bigger groups a lot of couples use more facilitators
Do not pressure people to start, let them get involved by following those more enthusiastic about the activities.
In activities like lining up, when people are a lot it is usefull to either split in more groups, give them more time, ask them more questions.