I realize this blog has been dead for awhile, but this seems like a decent place to put this. There’s a Transgender conference in my state and I submitted to do a workshop based on my Trans 101 For Trans People and it got accepted. I’m not certain how long my slot will be, but I’ll find out.
I, uh, I didn’t expect it to get accepted. At all. I’m not really sure what to do, if I should just read it. So, this is a call for advice- does anyone have any? If anyone’s done workshops before, do you have any advice? I have awhile, it’s at the end of April so about a month and a half…
Advice would be very helpful, though, I don’t do public speaking at all.
Is this at the Philly Trans Health Conference? Superfab no matter where! With workshops, I find it works best to do something that gets the audience directly involved — for instance, at some point give them questions to consider and have them form breakout groups to find answers (or just have an open discussion, if it’s a smaller crowd). Whatever you do, give the audience a chance to participate – there’s nothing more dull than a workshop that’s just someone standing at the front of the room talking at you.
Thanks for the advice, I’ll definitely try to do that.
Oh, duh, end of April — thus, not PTHC. Never mind.
In public speaking, I find simply reading sounds artificial and uninvolving, unless you have an accomplished actor doing the reading. It is better to have headings written down, and practise what you want to say for those headings. Think about how much audience participation you want- talk then questions, or questions after talk. Try to establish a friendly relationship with your audience. Have you any idea how large it will be?
Probably not that large. Maybe 20 people at most. I didn’t go to a lot of workshops last time but I think that’s about right. I’m not sure if I want to read the trans 101 thing and then try talking about it, or if I should condense it a bit/paraphrase/whatever. I should probably do a few test-readings to see about how long it takes and figure out after I know how much time I have.