Conversation Week Takes Todd Beamer High by Storm

By Vicki Robin, co-founder, Conversation Cafés

Todd Beamer High School in Federal Way, Washington not only ran with Conversation Week (March 24-31, 2007)- they took off and flew.

Teacher Jackie Jamison trained her classroom as Conversation Café hosts and organized them into action teams to produce a school-wide Conversation Café.

The Logistic Crew set up the room and supplied the tables with table clothes, food, talking objects and conversation prompts. The Marketing Crew papered the school walls with students' crucial questions, and invitations to attend the event.  They printed T-shirts too - white ones with a big orange question mark and black ones saying: Abandon [fill in your issue on a white blank] with a- band -on your wrist .

On the day of the event, students, student-hosts and faculty sat around dozens of tables for 8, picked a question, leaned in and entered that Conversation Café experience where curiosity, caring, courage, respect and discovery blend to bubble up insights and touch the heart. Afterwards, they had another classic CC moment - they absolutely wanted to do it again.

In a future newsletter we'll hear from the students themselves. This report is about the follow up Conversation Café on June 4, 2007. Same place. Same setting. New innovation was adding to the "orange wrist band" (meaning I have a burning question] blue bands for social issues, red bands for political issues and green bands for environmental issues were also available at each table. Students picked the color that represented the issue they were most interested in and tied them on to one another's wrists - already discovering that some things can only happen through cooperation.  At my table, we had gender, age, race, lifestyle (one Goth) and political diversity - all in just 5 of us. 

One girl brought up her question of "Why do we give so much money to foreign countries when we have so much need at home?"   Knowing that the US is among the least generous developed countries, I listened for what these students really meant. It was soon clear that in "foreign aid" they included the Iraq war, and they spent some time dueling with contradictory facts about why we were there and what to do. They brought in WMDs and retaliation for being attacked often enough as reasons for US involvement that I asked if they really thought Saddam Hussein had orchestrated the 9/11 attacks and had WMDs? Yes indeed, they did.  Did they like the US choices? Not across the board. Then I asked, "If the US were a student or a group of students in your school, who would it be?" Mostly they thought it was the bully - even though still thought we needed to defend ourselves. "If the terrorists were a student or group of students in the school, who would they be?" I asked. The discussion veered into Virginia Tech massacre, Columbine and Kip Kinkel who shot his parents and students in Springfield OR. Terrorists were lone actors with pent up feelings. 

They discussed if there was anything they could do to include "creepy" kids in so they wouldn't need to kill others. Pretty soon it was clear that everyone at that table had felt excluded - too dumb, too fat, too thin. Some had even wanted to "shoot up the whole school" because they felt so bad. Then one talked about what he did with "too fat." "I developed an outlet. I lift weights. Now I'm big but strong ." Another's outlet was art, saying she chose something she was good at instead of focusing on lagging behind others.  And this was that quiet moment of shared insight that comes in Conversation Cafés. Perhaps we cannot control our families, our body types, our schools, the world. But we can find an outlet for and direct that energy that builds up inside. Bottled up, it's a pressure cooker. "Outlet-ed" it's energy for excellence.

Finally we got to outlets the school provided - leadership courses, art, sports, Conversation Cafés - and the kids sadly revealed how many were disappearing in favor of academics. In following the thread of the conversation, in following agreements like "discovery or looking for new insights" and "speaking our hearts not just our minds" we got to an insight that professional educators might miss: by narrowing diversity of expression for fear of terrorists, we may be creating the very conditions that allow explosive pent up feelings to rise.

As I left I imagined what a school would be like that had a Conversation Café once a week instead of those assemblies I used to sit through with boring speakers, poor performances and endless announcements. What if a privilege of Senior year were hosting these conversation tables and the Juniors did the marketing and the Sophomores did the logistics and the skill of dialogue were a core competency for graduation? 

Every Conversation Week host - and every Conversation Café host in the nearly 6 years since we began - is on the front lines of the evolution of a culture of conversation.  Be it in schools or cafés, we desperately need what CCs offer: a place to speak with sincerity, listen with respect and seek truth together.