Writing exercise: The heritage potluck

The purpose of this exercise is to build the group's sense of community. It highlights how many kinds of intangible cultural heritage influence people's everyday lives. The exercise allows each participant to act as a heritage expert presenting their own heritage. Here you can find out more about encouraging participants to learn based on their own interest.

How the exercise enables transformative learning: The potluck metaphor contains the idea of eating, i.e. group members actively process each other's contributions.

The ideal number of participants: 6–15.

Duration: 3 hours.

Materials required: Group members bring the necessary materials with them.

Exercise description

1. The group agrees in advance that each member of the group brings something that represents a tradition
2. Each member of the group brings a text about a tradition and, if desired, other things related to the tradition, such as an object, clothing, musical instrument, food. The text can be just one sentence but also a poem or other artistic text.
3. Group members present their texts and objects to each other. For each one, the other group members "taste" the introduction by writing, for example, one sentence as an answer to it.

Other essential things: The most important thing is that everyone's contribution is appreciated.

Tips to the instructor: The instructor's role is to give detailed instructions as necessary during the tasting. You can write a memory about one object, a poem about another, etc. The instructor improvises the instructions according to what suits the contents of the potluck.

Video example

Watch the attached video to see how this exercise was run in our Finnish pilot, and what kind of discussion the Karelian "pulikka" rolling pin inspired.