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While thinking about the aspects of design and facilitation, I examined two resources on OneHE and Equity Unbound’s community building activities webpage:

Creating Escape Room Experiences for Students

In this activity, the facilitator/instructor creates a digital escape room game using Google slides. The tasks and possible answers are embedded in the slides. When the participants click on the correct answer, they proceed in the game, and when they click on the wrong answer they go back to that task and have a second chance to click on the correct answer. Every time the participants click on the correct answer, they receive a hint that will help them solve the final task in the game. 

In both the description and the video, Karina Alonso notes that the escape room learning activity can be modified for any content and for any age group. She emphasizes that facilitators/teachers can cater the game story to different ages, from younger children to adults. She suggests walking through a similar game before students start so that they understand how the game works and what the goal is. She also points out that students can work together in different constellations (e.g., individually, in pairs, or in groups).

Karina Alonso’s design already includes many equitable design and facilitation aspects, including catering the content and game story to students, showing them how the game works, and considering whether students work individually or collaboratively. However, her escape room design is highly dependent on vision. If a visually-impaired student is in a group of learners, that student would need to be paired with a learner who can see and explain the task on each slide. Another way to make the escape room design more equitable is to remove the visual elements altogether. Here is a discussion-based escape room activity that I co-designed and co-facilitated a few months ago for a professional development workshop. You’ll notice the escape room background story is more of a fun element layered onto the discussion activity. There are no “right” or “wrong” answers in this activity.

PowerPoint Karaoke

In this activity, students receive a slide deck with 10 images and use the images to improvise a story or presentation on the spot in 10 minutes. Instructors/facilitators can create the slide deck themselves, buy it from the PowerPoint Karaoke website, or have groups of students create the slide deck for their peers. The goals of the activity can include breaking the ice towards the beginning of a course, helping students overcome public speaking anxiety, and supporting students as they learn presentation skills and gain confidence in a fun, light-hearted way. Students can present individually, in pairs, or in small teams. When they present in pairs or small teams, the students can decide how they want to do it. The instructor/facilitator moves the slide deck from one slide to the next.

Jasmina Najjar, Maha Bali, and Hoda Mostafa’s design already shows equitable design and facilitation elements in three regards: 1) different constellations (individual, pair, group), 2) in the instructor clicking through the slide deck as the students present, 3) using ALT text for the slides. Yet, I feel this activity could be problematic for certain learners. First, this activity is very dependent on visual elements and would be difficult for visually-impaired learners even with ALT text. Second, presenting in front of the entire group is potentially extremely stressful for learners who struggle with social anxiety and/or performance anxiety. Third, in mixed groups with native speakers and non-native speakers, the non-native speakers may be at a disadvantage if their language skills are lower. Fourth, this activity caters to learners who tend to be more extroverted and/or willing to take risks.

To address these issues, I would consider making the following changes. First, if all learners are able to hear but some are visually-impaired, I would transform the activity into a “Soundscape Karaoke.”  I would not use any visuals and would instead prepare five to ten soundscapes in advance. I would put the students into pairs, give the class an overall topic, and then play the soundscapes one by one. After listening briefly to a soundscape, students would present to their partner. The pairs would, of course, be working simultaneously. This would also alleviate the problem of performance anxiety (at least a little) because the students are only presenting to a partner and not to the whole class. 

To support students with social anxiety, I would describe the activity to those students before the class session, including how I plan to implement it, and ask if they would like me to make any changes. If they feel they need the images or soundscapes in advance, I would share them with those students. I would consider it to be more important to raise these students’ confidence in interacting with their peers than to get them to practice their improv speaking skills.

To support students with lower language skills and students who are more introverted, I would give all students a little time during class to listen to the soundscapes or see the images to prepare for their presentation. Just making the soundscapes or slide deck images available for five to ten minutes in advance helps level the playing field, and the students will still practice their improv skills.

Finally, for those of you who teach languages and have your students do presentations or are thinking about having your students do presentations, I highly recommend the Speech and Presentation issue of the MindBrainEd Think Tank. The authors in this issue address designing and facilitating impromptu speeches, supporting neurodivergent learners, and many other useful topics.

Header image shows a spaceship landing and has the text "aiming for all students." It was generated using PhotoFunia: https://photofunia.com/categories/all_effects/retro-wave