Had a lovely experience yesterday setting up a little 'taster' of 'self organisation and Open Space principles' with a bunch of Engineering Students. The unit is focussed on Engineering and Social Justice.
The focus for the students this week was 'Community Engagement in Engineering Projects' so we set up a 2.5 hour session of self-organised conversations on this theme and asked each student to invite a community member to come along. We kicked off with 33 students and about 10 guests including experienced Engineers from industry and some fellow students from other (non engineering) faculties. In opening the circle I briefly explained that we were inviting the group into some self-organised conversations based on Open Space principles, and that Open Space would typically be over a 1-2 day period, but that we were really there to get a feel for how self-organisation works in a relatively short period of time. I continued with classic Open Space intro (four principles and one law), structured 2 x 45 minute conversations and a 15 minute closing circle. In the closing circle I invited participants to reflect on 'what did I notice and/or what did I learn from the conversations I participated in'. In opening the circle I was carrying a bit of background anxiety because the ideal condition for OS of voluntary participation was compromised by the fact that students were 'expected' to be there as part of the course, combined with the fact they were mainly teenagers (18-20) and well...they were teenagers. So when I walked out of the circle there was a longer than usual period of stunned silence (probably only 1-2 minutes but felt much longer to me). I breathed my way through it, and over a period of 15 minutes the topics slowly went up on the wall. They then got to work and had 2 hours of rich, deeply engaged conversation. Really smart, highly reflective, students engaged in creating a co-learning engagement with each other and, most significantly, with the guests. After the closing circle we had a 30 minute small group/large group debrief of 'self organising process and potential application in engineering projects contexts'. The overall comments were extremely positive. One student commented how the 'organic flow' of the conversations seemed to enable greater learning that sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture. The key learning for me was the extremely high value, to learning, of diversifying the group through inclusion of 'outsiders' (e.g. in this case, the community guests). I don't think we would have had anywhere near the same learning value if we'd just had the students talking about 'Community Engagement in Engineering Projects' if we hadn't actually included community members! In other words, we tried to model what we were talking about. And another happy outcome is that we introduced 33 engineering students to a new experience of self organisation and Open Space. Michael Wood Perth, Western Australia
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