3. The Laundrette

I will use this post to share the summary of the development of the Needs Cards tool I created as part of the Emotional Laundrette.

I started with a list of ‘needs’ which had been shared with us as part of Non-Violent Communication workshop last year. I wanted to use these needs cards because I learnt in the workshop how valuable it is to practice articulating and communicating personal needs in situations of conflict. I felt this was relevant to the issues we had seen with our students as a lot of the issues has been as a result of conflicts and miscommunications not being resolved quickly or openly. Things were left to fester and turn sore as a result. This idea of ‘addressing conflicts earlier’ was also outlined beautifully in how to give a good apology.

“If we cannot handle the small things between us, how will we be able to handle the big things? Learning how to address these smaller hurts or breaks in trust, can help us learn the basic skills we need to address larger harms. It can also help to reduce and prevent larger forms of harm and violence (e.g. hurt becoming conflict, conflict becoming harm, harm becoming violence). For example, if you cannot have a direct conversation with your friend about how they hurt your feelings or the toxic language your roommate used, then how will you be able to respond effectively to sexual violence or abuse in your community or family?” (Mingus, 2019))

I processed all these needs, and then tried to link these together into groups. I thought we needed less cards to make it easier.

I think looked at the reading I had been doing as part of the PGCert and tried to connect some key texts and quotes to the different needs. The reason for doing this was based on learning from PGCert community, I thought there was an opportunity here to also create provocations for learning and theoroetical engagement during the use of this tool. I wandered if the tool could also act as a conversation prompt in different contexts.

Here is the final tool with the texts I added to the back of the cards. These were printed and used within a testing workshop on Wednesday 17th July.