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World Cafe at New Student Orientation

We used World Cafe as part of our new student orientation this year. We orient about 120 students to the Master's of Social Work program at the University of Minnesota each August. This year we started the morning off with a World Cafe which seemed like a good way to meet our objectives for the day which are:

Provide a warm welcome to the SSW community
Preparing students to enter into a learning environment that promotes active participation and embracing inevitable discomfort as an opportunity
Exploring ideas of identity, privilege and power as they relate to entering into the MSW program and preparing for professional social work practice
Framing the MSW program in terms of the intersection of multicultural practice and social justice
Assist students in beginning to develop a personal concept of social justice

Students, faculty and staff all participated in World Cafe together. We did three rounds and in each round we offered the group a quote and a conversation question.

World Café Round 1

“The purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

Introduce yourself and discuss what this quote means to you as you start out this academic year as a member of the School of Social Work community?

World Café Round 2

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” – Lila Watson

What does the profession of social work look like with this as a guide for our service?

World Café Round 3

“I looked down and saw shards of my mother glistening like snow crystals under a bright morning sun. I looked into her glaring eyes and heard her soft but stern voice. ‘You need to be more careful’.” Mark Anthony Rolo (p. 1, My Mother is Now Earth) (Note: This is a quote from a book that everyone read before coming to the orientation

In this passage, Rolo is describing his dream. How would this warning apply at a societal level? When we look to our society, and communities within our society, where do we see the "shards," and how might we go about "being more careful?"

We were challenged by space. Our orientation room had stadium-style seating and all the other rooms in the building were reserved for other purposes. Space is at a premium on campus right before the term starts! We got creative with the public spaces in the building, using nearly every nook and cranny we could find. We were able to create 10 conversation spaces in the atrium and others were on two different floors. We invited the participants into the challenge of making this work with us and stationed staff at critical places on each floor to help direct traffic between rounds so that everyone could find a place to land. We had all three rounds of questions printed on the tables because we had no way to communicate with the group as a whole once we got started. It went surprisingly well.

A note about tables: We used 6' long tables for the most part and we had conversation with 4 to 5 people. 6' tables actually work quite well for WC even though they aren't as intimate as the small rounds.

By way of harvest, we asked each table to write on a large post it (8.5x5.5) a word or a thought or an image that captured one piece of their conversation. We posted these back in our stadium style room. Each round was color coded and had matching question pages and post it sheets.

World Cafe at New Student Orientation

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