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
