KAS stands for Knowledge, Awareness and Safety and is an education project run by the local Rape Crisis Centre in Carlow.  The KAS Cafe has become an annual event bringing together students, teachers, Rape Crisis Centre Workers and civil servants to look at both what’s working with this programme and how it can be improved. (It has nothing to do with cans of lemon drink - I just liked the picture !)

What is particularly excellent about these cafes is getting people who would never normally talk to share, learn and improve together ….

The results of the cafe have been written up separately, if you’d like to know more, let me know - this posting is intended to be focussed more on the experience of the process, with the idea that it might help others think about the benefits of similar processes in other contexts.

This year over 30 transition year students from nine schools turned up with about 10 teachers and 10 ‘others’.

World Cafe, as a methodology, enables the ’system’ to see itself  i.e.  the students to see that their experience as part of a bigger picture, the ‘others’ to get an idea of what the programme is like from a student perspective etc etc

And then once the ’system’ is able to see itself better, there is more potential for informed creativity about possible next steps ….

(If you want to know more about World Cafe, in general, have a look at www.theworldcafe.com)

I just love the idea of senior civil servants talking with real students and real teachers about real experiences.  Everyone learning from each other, everyone growing together.

It interests me why so many important decisions are taken, policies developed etc without doing something like this first.

We can do so much better.

It has been such a pleasure to facilitate this event the last couple of years, the learning has been so rich, the feedback so good and the focus for improvement so clear.

If you’d like to talk about how to do this kind of thing in your kind of context, please do get in touch.