Pecha Kucha Presentations
In June, I attended the Children’s Spirituality Summit held at Lipscombe University. You can read my initial reflection here. One element of the Summit included a session of 6 “Pecha Kucha” presentations on a variety of topics related to children and family ministry. I will be writing another post about some of the topics presented but in this post I would like to briefly reflect on this presentation style.
I had never heard of this presentation style before attending this summit. In a nutshell, it is a style of presenting where you select 20 images that are inserted into a powerpoint presentation to display for 20 seconds each while you speak. Total length of the presentation is 6 minutes and 40 seconds. This style of presentation was developed by an architecture firm in 2003 which you can read more about here.
I am really intrigued by this style of presentation and have been reflecting on the ways this could influence teaching and communication, especially alongside my growing interest in visual faith formation ideas (check out The Visual Faith Project) and current Gen Z research around 8 second attention spans.
Concision, both in writing and speaking, is much more difficult to do well then long-winded speaking or writing and much more powerful! It requires strategically thinking through what you want to communicate and the best words to do so. One course I took in Seminary required that I write 1 page papers on various leadership topics. The professor warned our class that he would only read 1 page, even if we submitted more and would grade us according to what was written on the first page. I remember taking a lot more time writing those papers then the 10 page papers required for other classes!
Considering the variety of studies that reveal the power of visual processing and the emotional and personal connection evoked in images, I wonder what it would mean if we adapted a “pecha kucha” style to our preaching, our teaching and other faith formation opportunities? What effect might this have on the spiritual formation both of individuals, families and communities? What questions come to your mind as you consider this approach?
I would love to continue this conversation with you and hear your thoughts!
That is an intriguing way to present. I love the idea of being more visual and adding more for the mind to contemplate, but I can see how it would be so difficult to be precise. I checked out the website you posted and there were several that missed the mark, due to timing or were not as interesting, or I did not understand why they were showing me the photo, but then I found one that was more impressive. I would be interested to see how this applies to children’s ministries since most of the videos were on other topics when I looked.
I posted the website since I discovered that was where the presentation style originated in my research after the summit and I agree there are not a lot of helpful examples there! The ones I saw at the summit were fairly well done but all 6 presenters were doing this style for the first time. There are 2 that really stood out for me as being extremely well done and grasping the concept and the other 4 were ok. I am in the midst of experimenting with the style now for some teaching and whether there is potential application in children’s ministry.