Building inter-cohort connections and community: the World Café

Programs in the School of Education and Technology have always placed an emphasis on building cohort-wide learning communities where learners and faculty members share knowledge, experience, and resources amongst themselves. In recent years, faculty and staff have an introduced an opportunity for learners who are in different programs in SET to meet one another and to begin building some initial inter-cohort connections via a World Café dialogue process.

According to Brown and Isaacs (2005), the World Café is an:

innovative yet simple methodology for hosting conversations about questions that matter. These conversations link and build on each other as people move between groups, cross-pollinate ideas, and discover new insights into the questions or issues that are most important in their life, work, or community. As a process, the World Café can evoke and make visible the collective intelligence of any group, thus increasing people’s capacity for effective action in pursuit of common aims.

The World Café event has been a feature of the summer residency period in SET for over five years. It coincides with the semi-annual meeting of the School’s Advisory Council and enables members of the council to take time out of their full-day meeting schedule to meet learners in the various SET programs that are on campus at the same time. As Brown and Isaacs claim, however, the real value of the event is the opportunity for learners, staff, faculty, and council members to collectively engage in exploring timely issues of concern to all SET members. These issues are posed as questions related to the nexus of leadership, learning and technology that enable participants to learn from each other and to self-reflect on how these issues relate to their own professional practice. As themes, perspectives, and ideas emerge from the table discussions, they are captured in real-time using a graphic recording process.

Our last World Café event was held on July 27, 2018 but we are already looking forward to planning the next one in the summer of 2019.