A single photograph, handed to a small group with no context at all: that was the opening move of Judging by the Cover, a session that asked participants to say what they assumed about the person in the picture, then sit with how much of it turned out to be wrong. Our participants from Slovakia took part alongside six other delegations at a chalet in the Krkonoše foothills above Rokytnice nad Jizerou, for Includify, a youth exchange built around inclusion and diversity.
The session set the tone for a stretch of the exchange that had less to do with abstract values and more to do with catching an assumption in the act, before it hardened into something the group carried around without noticing.
Judging by the Cover
Every first impression the small groups had made about their photograph turned out to be missing something, sometimes almost everything. For our Slovak participants, the exercise landed less as a lesson and more as a mirror: the same shortcut that had just been proven wrong about a stranger in a photo was the same shortcut everyone in the room used constantly, about each other, without noticing.
Prevent the Unexpected
Prevent the Unexpected pushed the same idea into scenario work: small teams were handed situations where an assumption about someone, quietly acted on, would have gone wrong, and asked to work out what noticing it earlier would have taken. Our participants worked through this alongside teammates they had misjudged, in small ways, only a day or two earlier in Judging by the Cover, which gave the exercise a sharper edge than a hypothetical scenario usually carries.
A Room Built for Disagreement
Earlier in the exchange, a Human Rights Debate had already given the group a structured way to disagree without the conversation falling apart, a skill that turned out to matter again once assumptions and prejudice were on the table directly. Our Slovak participants carried that same structure into the later sessions: name the disagreement, hold the argument, and keep the person across the table as a person rather than a position.
Inclusion, one participant put it afterward, stopped being just a nice word on a poster.
What Got Harder to Ignore
Our Slovak participants came home from Chata pod Lipami with a smaller, sharper habit than a general sense of having learned something: catching an assumption about a person before it becomes a decision about them. For young people from Slovakia, ten days spent testing that habit against six other countries’ worth of first impressions makes it a lot harder to un-notice back home.
Testimonials
I felt more confident, more open, more me.
Photo Gallery
A few more moments from this activity :)
Check these and more photos in the activity’s photo album.
