Reflective Graphics & The World Café

The Following is taken from a letter from Conrad Tiu, responding to questions from Milwaukee school superintendent Blane McCann about reflective graphics and the World Café:

1. Regarding the logistical questions around reflective graphic recording:

Unfortunately for your art teacher, recording is not about the art or materials but about listening. She can use any materials she wants, but that is not what makes or breaks the recording. Markers are actually the fastest tools around. When she does recording, Nancy Margulies works almost exclusively with those. As an artist, Nancy uses other tools and media, but when she does graphic recording its usually just markers. Most times, recorders use pastels as well (like me).

Listening, as I said, is the most important aspect of the process, and it is a special kind of listening. For me, it is meditative, attaining a kind of flow, an emptying and a cleansing. Then whatever comes of the moment, comes, and I record it. It is being present (and not allowing any internal critics or voices to get in the way of the listening) and attending to every moment and everything that emerges in the room. Every recorder has their own style, emphasis, etc. What is truly important is that the work produced enables the participants to anchor their experience and relive it in a meaningful way.

The recording is not about the drawings. It is about harvesting the experience in the room. I have personally seen art teachers get frustrated (like the lady you described), after trying on what I do. Nothing in their training prepares them for the paradoxical focused and open attention this kind of process requires. My observation was that their artistic skill actually got in the way of the recording.

As for resources, you can start with:
The International Forum of Visual Practitioners
There are many links on that page including links to actual practitioners and their homepage links. On the homepage are links to resources and where one can get them, including books, etc.

Grove International
The "Grove" is more like a consulting place that offers many live and pre-planned graphic services. They offer training for would be graphic recorders. There is nothing sacred or magical about what the "grove" offers, they are just one of the few consulting firms that is aware of this type of work.

Finally, there is nothing like watching a graphic recorder at work in a meeting and following along with one's own pad, taking note of the meta-process, what gets in the canvas, what does not, etc., comparing and contrasting with what one notices, etc.

As a last note on this, doing graphic recording for the "World Café" process is one of the most demanding ones for a reflective graphic recorder. Recording a keynote, where the speaker has a topic and usually follows on logically and progressively, touching on highlights and important points, on lists, etc., is like recording the melody line of a song. The World Café is like recording a jazz improvisation session. The voices are all different, some higher, some focused, others tentative. It is much denser, thicker. It creates, not lines of thought and points, but fractals that flow spontaneously from a seed question. The share-out can feel like drinking from a fire hose. If you noticed during our session in Boston, while the table conversations are going on and the recorder (me) is "not recording," I was actually walking around from table to table, listening. Sometimes, I would sit, but I am in constant reflection and meditation. This is my process of being "on" and "charged" for the share out and enables me to proceed with automaticity. More than one recorder has confided in me that they would rather do a keynote (easier) than a café (much more complex) any day of the week.

The process David (Isaacs) was talking about was when I lead a school I was newly assigned to through an accreditation process (it was their first time). The school was highly fractured, rudderless and contentious. I used the café process extensively, however, I did not use the term "World Café," except cursorily. The last thing any one in LAUSD, especially a disgruntled teacher, wants to go through is another "program." Instead, I utilized the principles without the labels. It was every effective and was a crucial element for the school to go through the accreditation successfully. Now the school is unified. Most teachers have stepped up to the plate and took ownership of different facets (leadership, assessment, instruction, culture, etc.) without being asked. They naturally formed collaborative groups to take on our challenges in student learning. My role in all this was to steward the process, to listen to all the voices and to pose the question that emerged in the room while encouraging all others to do the same (listening and inquiring). My role was to convene and to invite people to participate. My role was to protect the divergent voices, give attention and respect to dissidents and listen for the yearning behind their criticisms and anger. My role was to notice, and to pay attention to what was emerging. Finally, my role was step out of the way and repeatedly remove barriers from the decisions they made.

The World Café is a divergent process. It is one of the best out there, because it is so natural, organic and feels so human. The reason why harvesting (reflective graphic recording) is so important is because, the harvest provides the "content" that will make up the structure for any action plan, convergent process and common ground boundary-making that will need to happen. Teachers will be "okay" with ambiguity as long as they have the experience that the sharing and ideas "harvested" are not lost, but are recorded publicly, right before their eyes, in the room. Later when they see the charts taken out again, displayed in the hallways, in other meetings for comment and enhancement, and iteratively used, reused, and grown and referred to over and over again, they see that the process is not only valuable but integral to the work.

In terms of inquiry, much of the harvested material are questions, many of which cannot be answered by a "yes," "no," nor a research, or fact-finding committee, but only through the ambiguous, uncertain, experiential willful groping forward (the bottom of the "U?") together to an uncertain future. The café fosters the open-mind, open-heart and finally, open-will spaces to let the future come.