Question Game

Instructions:

    • Everyone stands in a circle. 

    • One at a time each person asks the person to the left of them a question

      • The receiving person cannot respond, answer, laugh, or stutter. 

    • Instead that person must turn to their left and ask a different question to the person next to them. 

    • Questions cannot be repeated.

    • Anyone who repeats a question, pauses, or answers is out of the game

  1. Modifications:

    Sometimes, I will add a few constraints. For example, when helping students through an assigned reading, I will instruct them to only ask questions about the reading or questions that surfaced for them while completing the reading.  

  2. Praxis (why + theory):

    I use this game as a tool to develop our group’s shared agreements within the space. After we complete the game, I usually offer the insights acquired from the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond Undoing Racism workshops in which we were taught that whiteness has conditioned us to believe that asking questions–admitting that we don’t know something–is an indication of weakness, and we should be ashamed of those gaps in our knowledge. 

    We combat this ideology with an immediate commitment to counteraction. Though the questions typically become silly and outlandish, there is a personal strategy and intercommunal trust that develops amongst the circle as we are equally challenged to think critically quickly and believe that, no matter the question, you will remain in the group. (Unless you repeat a question, in which case you are out… However, if someone asks “is the sky blue” and you later ask, “why isn’t the sky blue?” then you are good.)

    Additionally, in this game we learn to listen fully without interrupting or responding even as we contain the growing anticipation in our bodies. 

    I am particularly fond of the work of supporting students and youth in learning to ask critical singular questions. I am far more interested in how their questions will reorient us toward new directions than how their answers might perform for us.