an open space story

[Esther Ewing]

Oh Birgitt:

What a wonderful story.

Let me counter with my own. I recently led an open space at the high school
in which I volunteer. The group were 60 high school students and about 8
teachers and three community workers who came together to talk about issues
of school safety.  (Today, the teachers, the community workers and myself
had a discussion to debrief the process.)

The Open Space got off to a wonderful start. The students were really
interested although some had volunteered, they said, so they could get out
of French class!!

The students got right into it. They were very concerned about weapons and
violence. They raised issues of being able to walk home safely without
being harrassed by local gangs. They were concerned that there was too much
swearing and disrepectful talk. And they were full of great ideas and
reccommendations. The teachers were thrilled and pleased at the idea that
they did not have to "do it all" when it came to solving the school safety
issues. They appreciated that the solutions the kids came up with would not
necessarily have been ones they would have chosen but understood that the
kids were being true to what they thought would work in their culture.

The teachers also had an interesting time experimenting with striking the
balance with not directing the kids and deflecting when some kids wanted to
use the teacher in the group to debate whether the teachers were doing what
they should be doing and blaming teachers. The question they raised with me
in the debrief was, "Do you have some suggestions for how we could be more
effective in encouraging the kids to come up with solutions rather than
just defending our actions?" I didn't see as much defensive behaviour as
the teachers had felt they'd displayed. They were really keen to encourage
the kids to take ownership of the issues and they were really very good at
this.

The conclusions they came to were that Open Space had really worked well
with the kids. That both kids and teachers could benefit from running more
meetings in Open Space - that they would get more and more familiar with
the benefits that could acrue and that they would all get better at using
it and harvesting the opportunities.

All in all, I was really pleased.

Regards,
Esther