Civic Participation and Community Action Sourcebook

Prep and Practice

Timeline Activities

Timelines are terrific tools for pulling together people’s individual knowledge, framing inquiry, and helping folks analyze their collective experiences. Here are two effective ways to structure activities:

1) Identify a period of time you want to study, or identify an issue (e.g. immigration) or institution (e.g. your workplace) that you want to understand better by knowing its history. Ask people to make individual notes of what they remember about that history. These should include memories about what was happening in the world and in their communities, as well as what was happening in the lives of their families. Ask them to post the world and community events/phenomena above the timeline, and their family events below. Ask participants to break into small groups, one for each time period, and briefly discuss what they know of the period. Then each group writes in its information. Other participants add events that have been left out.

When everyone, including the facilitator, has added as much to the timeline as they can, have participants comment on any new insights or learning from reading this history.
• What have been the shifts over time? The patterns?
• What events/changes have been most significant and why?
• How did world and community events impact families?
• What major events might happen in the next ten years?
• What major events would you like to happen in the next ten years?
• To what extent can we plan for change? Which of the changes in the timeline were controlled or controllable?

2) Timelines can be useful in looking at the history of struggle on an issue. The historical timeline is a tool that helps participants reconstruct the history of their struggle in order to see what lessons can be learned from this history and to see how forces shift over time.

Ask the group to identify a current issue or struggle that is critical to their interests. Ask them to discuss and agree on a timeframe that they’d like to examine in order to understand better how this struggle has evolved. When does it begin and end? Draw a line along newsprint and write these dates at opposite ends. The group might want to project anticipated future events as well.

As in the activity above, ask individuals to note what they know about the history of that issue. This time, however, they are focusing on the factors and events that either worked in favor of or against that struggle. They will post these above and below the timeline. Again, they’ll first look for patterns:

• What do you notice about the historical forces (pro and con) that worked on this issue?
• What factors seem to be most important for moving the struggle forward? Keeping it back?
• What lessons can be learned for the future?

What Did I Do?
During my last class session, I discovered that the students I was working with had minimal real awareness of the number of decisions and decision-makers that surround them in everyday life. I decided to try an exercise to make them think of the extent to which others are in a position to make decisions that can affect them. I designed a timeline that depicted different periods in life from birth to post 65. There were five periods in all (0-5 years), (6-15 years), (16-20 years), (21-64), and (65+). I divided the class into groups.

What Did My Students Do?
Each group listed all the people that had decision-making power over them during their selected period. They also had to list one or two examples of the kinds of decisions that could be made by each listed person. When each group had finished, we reviewed each list and the students had the opportunity to add to each other’s list. They then selected one decision-maker and created a situation to learn the question formulation technique. The situation focused on a worker who had just gotten notice that he had been laid off. We went through the beginnings of the questioning process and got as far as the discussion about close and open-ended questions. During this phase, we frequently discussed the role of the questioning in the decision-making process.

Pat Nelson teaches at Second Start in Concord, NH and develops resources for the Right Question Project.

Table of Contents