Purpose:
This activity encourages people to talk and reflect in pairs about the experiences that shape their own personal cultural identity, building community and starting conversations.
What’s Needed:
- Colorful tickets, three different colors, (or small pieces of paper). Each person gets a set of colored tickets, one of each color. In other words, if you have 30 people, you’ll need 30 yellow, 30 red, and 30 blue tickets, set up in sets of 3 (one yellow, one red, and one blue) so that they can easily be distributed to each person.
- Pens
To Do
Pass out the ticket packets and invite participants to put their name on each of the three tickets.
Start by letting everyone know that you are going to do a ‘ticket exchange.’ They will begin by exchanging the red ticket. You could say: Pick someone you don’t know very well. Talk to this person for a few minutes about the question that I give you. Make sure you have time for each of you to talk. After talking about one question, I’ll ask you to find a different person, exchange a different ticket, and answer a different question.
Possible Questions (It’s important to start with questions that are familiar and not very stressful to answer):
- What was your favorite childhood food? Something special to your family…
- Walk with someone about where you grew up and how that shaped who you are.
- Share a challenging work situation you later realized was arising from a cultural difference (for example, a misunderstanding relating to differences in technology use such as when it’s OK to check text messages).
- The first time you realized that the way your family does something is different than how others do something.
- A realization that a disagreement has arisen because of differences in communication styles or word usage.
